by Amy Andrews
Dear God—he might not be as stupid as she’d thought, but she was losing IQ points fast.
Everyone was looking at her. Say something, damn it!
‘Why, when you have a maths degree, did you lead me to believe you were dumb?’
Tuck shot a look at his cousin. ‘Aww, Reese,’ he said, putting on his best yokel accent, ‘you done went and spoiled all my fun.’
‘Knock it off, Tuck.’ Reese tutted. ‘You shouldn’t bait people. It’s not nice.’
Cassie frowned, ignoring them. ‘I don’t understand why you would underestimate your intelligence.’
Tuck supposed Cassie wouldn’t, in her world of logic and reason, so there was no point trying to explain how crazy being treated like a dumb jock made him. She hadn’t been deliberately obtuse, like so many others, just clueless, so he was prepared to cut her some slack.
‘Would you have let me kiss you some more last night if you’d known I was smarter?’
Cassie suspected she very much would have. Brains and pheromones were apparently a dangerous combination. Hell, the man could kiss her right now, in front of a dining room full of people, and she’d be powerless to resist.
‘Some more?’ Gina said, her eyebrows practically hitting her hairline.
‘He kissed you!’ Marnie spluttered.
‘You kissed her?’ Reese demanded.
Tuck looked at the three fierce women opposite him and then at the silent one beside him, her gaze roving over his throat like a vampire deciding where to make her first bite. It branded him like a physical caress and streaked heat to his groin where things stirred with the same potency they’d had last night.
‘Cassie?’ Marnie prompted.
Cassie dragged her eyes off Tuck’s neck. ‘Oh, yeah. I left that bit out, didn’t I?’
‘Er, yeah,’ Marnie said.
Cassie looked at her friends, all looking at her expectantly, waiting for more. Tuck was watching her too. And all the while his pheromones battered and pulled at her, weakening her resistance. She had to get away from them.
From him.
She stood. ‘I have work to do.’
‘Oh, no—wait, Cassie,’ Marnie said. ‘You can’t spend all your time at a luxury estate holed up in your room on your laptop.’
Tuck couldn’t agree more. Being holed up in her room with her on his lap, making Little-Miss-Know-It-All come undone, sounded much preferable.
‘Marnie’s right,’ Gina said. ‘We’re going to the spa for the day. Why don’t you join us?’
Cassie was surprised that Marnie and Gina were voluntarily spending time in each other’s company. Although was that a desperate please come look in Gina’s eyes? Normally she would have agreed to be their buffer zone, but a day where their deflection would land squarely on her and, by association, Tuck, was not something she wanted to volunteer for.
Gina might be convinced that bonking Tuck was the solution, but Cassie wasn’t ready to allow hormones and libido to conquer brainpower.
She just needed to get absorbed in her work again.
‘Stars wait for no woman,’ she said, glancing at Tuck for good measure, to send him a message too—she wouldn’t be derailed by biology.
And she fell into his cosmic blue eyes, temporarily forgetting her own name.
Tuck smiled at her, raising an eyebrow slightly at her defiant expression. But she wasn’t fooling him. He could see other things in her gaze as well, like the hunger from last night. Maybe he could convince her about the beauty of a different kind of star. The kind that popped and exploded behind shut lids as she rode the tail of a stratospheric orgasm.
‘Join us later for something to eat.’
Cassie dragged her gaze from Tuck’s, grateful to Gina for the interruption. He looked at her as if he knew exactly what she was thinking and it was unsettling. ‘I’ll see,’ she evaded as Gina’s desperation not to be alone with Marnie was confirmed. ‘I have a lot of stuff to get through before I start at Cornell next week. I’ll probably get room service.’
She might not be looking at him but she could still feel his eyes on her. His words from last night came back to her. All work and no play make Cassie a dull girl. She’d never been tempted to ditch her work before, but his hot gaze made her want to do a lot of things she hadn’t done.
‘We’ll call you when we’re done,’ Marnie said.
Cassie nodded. She stood awkwardly for a moment or two, conscious of all eyes on her, then bade them goodbye.
The four remaining occupants of the table watched her walk away. Tuck shuddered as her shapeless shirt hung like a bag on her frame.
‘Now, why would a woman want to hide such a damn fine figure?’ he asked as he turned back to face the table.
Three sets of female eyes were trained firmly upon him and he shifted uncomfortably. He was a man used to female attention—but not like this.
‘What?’ he said warily.
‘Don’t play with her, Tuck,’ Reese warned. ‘She’s not like your other women.’
Tuck kind of liked that the most about Cassie, but he cocked an eyebrow and tried to look a little insulted. ‘My other women?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Reese said reproachfully. ‘She’s not a player.’
‘She’s pretty sheltered,’ Marnie added.
Tuck looked at Cassie’s three musketeers. ‘She’s a big girl. Surely she can look after herself?’
‘She’s not experienced with guys like you,’ Gina explained.
‘Guys like me?’
Gina shot him a silky smile. ‘Man-whore guys.’
Tuck faked a hurt look and shot it his cousin’s way. ‘Reese, honey, your friends are being mean to me.’
Reese snorted. ‘Tuck. Listen to me. I know your career ending in injury the way it did was hard, and that you’ve been a little aimless since your divorce and have been…enjoying the spoils of being God’s gift to women…but I’m asking you to not choose Cassie as your next form of denial.’
It was Tuck’s turn to snort. His career ending, his impulsive marriage crumbling, his infertility—all had been body-blows over the last couple of years. Separately they would have been challenging to any man’s ego, but together they’d been an enormous whammy. So what if he’d been trying to prove he was still the man?
But Reese was right, Cassie wasn’t his type. He dated women who knew the ropes. And he didn’t need a PhD in relationships to know that Cassie did not.
He put up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay. I won’t go near her. I promise.’
Reese patted his hand. ‘Atta-boy.’
By ten o’clock Cassie was ready to weep with frustration. She’d achieved exactly nothing all day. Instead of auroras and how they affected weather patterns on Jupiter she’d doodled Tuck’s name on a writing pad all day. Every web search she’d conducted, every paper she’d picked up, every image she’d looked at, Tuck and his smell and his accent and his lazy grin had hijacked her thoughts.
Her whole body ached with trying to deny the surge of hormones that had her in their thrall. Two cold showers hadn’t helped—she still felt hot and feverish, as if she was craving a drug. She’d tried to work through it, she really had, but everything got back to Tuck.
One night—that was all she had to do. She just had to get through this night and then she’d be gone in the morning, and far away from him and his pheromones, and she could get her brain back. Her focus.
She stared at her door for t
he thousandth time. Just through it and across the hallway was the cause of all her angst. Cassie took a step towards it. No! She forced herself to stop, turn around. She snatched up the phone instead and dialled Gina.
‘I need you to talk me off the ledge.’
‘Well, hello to you too,’ Gina said.
‘I mean it. I can’t stop thinking about him.’
‘If you rang me to talk you out of it, you rang the wrong friend—should have chosen Marnie. I absolutely think you should go for it.’
Cassie gripped the phone. Suddenly she was ready for hormones and libido to trump brainpower. ‘Tell me more about your theory.’
‘What…the bonk Tuck theory?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s simple, really. You’re the one who’s always telling us we’re biological creatures at heart, with primal needs, right?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘So isn’t it logical, then, to follow that biological imperative?’
Cassie liked logic—a lot. And she couldn’t fault Gina’s. She’d just never imagined that she’d be at the mercy of biology.
‘Look upon it as an experiment to prove the theory,’ Gina continued. ‘You scientists are big on that, right? You have a problem. Tuck could be the solution. But there’s only one way to find out for sure, right?’
‘So like a…a sexual experiment?’
‘Yes,’ Gina said enthusiastically. ‘Exactly.’
‘I guess I could submit to a one-off experiment,’ Cassie mused, chewing her lip, her heart pounding at the thought. ‘To test the theory.’
‘Er…it might take more than a one-off, Cass.’
Cassie considered that for a moment. ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m wired for more than one-offs…and it’s about biology after all, right? So, theoretically, the act of copulation should be enough to satisfy.’
‘I think you’re going to get more than copulation from Tuck. Just saying…’
Cassie nodded, ignoring the warning as her brain moved on to logistics. ‘So, what…? I should just go up and say How about it?’
Gina laughed. ‘Just knock on his door and tell him you want him. Trust me, he’ll take it from there.’
Tuck glanced at the clock when a knock sounded on his door. It was almost eleven. He was sprawled on his king-size bed, in his hotel robe, watching a game with the lights and the sound turned low.
And he knew it was her.
He drained the last of his beer before sauntering towards the door, a grin on his face. He turned the handle and pulled it partially open, his hand sliding up the frame to rest somewhere above his head.
Cassie stood there looking up at him. ‘Can I come in?’
Tuck felt her quiet request grab hold of his gut and squeeze. No sexy posturing. No batting of her eyelids. ‘What do you want, Cassiopeia?’
Cassie swallowed, not even sure if she could get the word out around her parched throat. ‘You,’ she croaked.
Tuck’s breath stuttered to a halt for a moment and his grip on the door tightened. She was grim-faced and serious, and sporting scraped-back hair and terrible clothes, yet his body surged to attention. He’d promised he wouldn’t go near her, but he hadn’t made any promises in regards to her coming to him.
He pulled the door open further and fell back, gesturing her inside.
FOUR
Cassie shut her eyes as she brushed past him, her nostrils flaring at his scent, her dry mouth suddenly inundated with saliva. She walked to the centre of the room, her heart rate ratcheting off the charts. She turned to face him. He was lounging against the door, and in the dim light he looked all broad and brooding and watchful.
Now what?
She’d kind of hoped he’d take over from here. Gina had assured her he would. But clearly he wasn’t going to make it easy.
‘Are you going to stand over there?’ she asked.
Her voice sounded weird in the air-conditioned bubble of the silent hotel room. High and breathy. She swallowed again.
‘For the moment,’ Tuck said, crossing his arms.
Cassie wished he wouldn’t. She wanted him to come closer. To bring his height and his breadth and his perfectly symmetrical features and his incredibly male smell right over, close to her. And take the lead.
Computing the wind speed across auroras on giant gas planets, she could do—asking a man to have sex with her, not so much.
She opened her mouth, took a tentative step towards him, then stopped. Shut her mouth. This should be easy. A cinch. She had a giant brain and an excellent vocabulary. But once again she felt as if she was wearing the dunce’s cap.
Tuck took pity on her. He’d never known a woman to be alone in a room with him and not know what to do. Especially when he was in nothing but a robe and his underwear. It was strangely erotic.
‘So, does “you” mean what I think it means?’ he asked.
Cassie’s brain came back online at the verbal prompt. He was giving her a way in—a conversation-starter. And she snatched at it like the last molecule of oxygen on earth.
‘Yes,’ she said, then cleared her throat because it sounded sappy and weak again. ‘I’m not very good at this—’
‘Boy,’ Tuck interrupted with a smile, ‘how’d that one go down? Couldn’t have been easy to admit. I imagine you’re good at most things.’
Cassie glared at his interruption—didn’t he know how hard this was? ‘I’m good at everything…except this.’
‘And this is…?’
Cassie took a deep breath. ‘This is me asking you to have sex. With me.’
It was blunt and gauche and totally unsexy—and Tuck had never been more turned on in his life.
‘This is purely scientific, you understand?’ Cassie clarified as Tuck continued to watch her with his blue eyes. ‘I seem to have developed a…thing for your pheromones.’
Tuck raised an eyebrow. ‘My pheromones?’
‘Yes. They’re chemicals the body emits—’
Tuck chuckled, interrupting her. ‘I know what pheromones are, Cassiopeia.’
‘Oh, right…yes, sorry. Well, I don’t know if you know this or not, but you do smell pretty amazing.’
Tuck smiled. ‘I have been told that a time or two before.’
Cassie absorbed that information, missing the nuance in her bid to get to the point. ‘Anyway…I find myself unable to concentrate on my work, and Gina suggested that, because I’m a female in my sexual prime, my libido is demanding to be…serviced…and that a spot of…copulation…might be the solution to my problem.’
Tuck felt his erection swell further. He should not be turned on by a woman in shapeless clothes talking about servicing and copulation. Pretty, perky women with enhanced assets and bold use of four-letter words were his staple turn-ons.
And yet he was very turned on. ‘Copulation?’
She nodded. ‘It’s all very logical, really.’
Tuck made his way towards her, keeping his pace slow and lazy. ‘So this is you seducing me?’
Cassie took a step back as his masculine scent drew her into his wild pheromone cloud. ‘I…guess.’
Tuck stopped when he was an arm’s length from her. He dropped his gaze and took a slow tour of her body. It didn’t take long—there wasn’t a lot he could make out. Her breasts, which he remembered very well from her criss-cross dress last night, were vaguely discernible beneath a voluminous T-shirt that proclaimed ‘Come to the nerd side. We have Pi’.<
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He smiled at the logo as he lifted a hand and fingered the sleeve. ‘This is what you wear to a seduction?’
Cassie looked down. It hadn’t even occurred to her to change her clothes. She’d got into her pyjamas an hour ago, after her second cold shower. Gina would have a fit if she knew. ‘Oh. Yes. Guess it’s not very—’ she swallowed ‘—sexy.’
Tuck shrugged. ‘Funny can be sexy.’
‘It’s a tradition,’ she explained as his gaze roved all over her shirt. It suddenly felt like it was on fire. ‘Gina, Reese and Marnie send me geek T-shirts as a…it’s a joke…’ She petered out as she realised she was babbling. ‘Sorry. Like I say, I’m not very good at this.’
Tuck disagreed. Cassie’s unique approach was being very much appreciated by one particular part of his body. ‘So,’ he murmured, his fingers dropping from Cassie’s sleeve to stroke up and down her arm, ‘would you like the standard copulation package or one of the many variations I offer?’
Cassie pulled her arm away as an army of goose bumps marched across her skin and a seductive waft of Tuck flared her nostrils. ‘Oh, I think the standard will be fine.’ Her voice was husky again and she cleared it. ‘I still have a paper to get back to. No time for variations.’
Tuck smiled. A man with a less robust ego might have been intimidated by her haste to be done with it. But he was not one to go for ‘copulation’ by the clock. And she’d given him a goal now—to wipe that research paper from her head for the rest of the night.
Or die trying.
‘Okay,’ he said, stepping in closer to her, until her body was a hand-touch away, ‘long, sweet, slow loving it is.’
Cassie swayed as her senses were engulfed in a wave of him, drenching every cell in a primal urge. She felt his hand warm on her waist, steadying her, and her eyes pinged open, her gaze snared in the brilliant blue of his.
‘That’s your standard?’ she asked, her voice squeaky.
Tuck shrugged. ‘I have high standards.’
