Was it dangerous?  Yes.  But going by my suddenly throbbing body, my tingling thighs, my aching breasts, perhaps I needed a touch of danger in my life.

It had been so long since I’d felt desire like this.

It wasn’t something I wanted to disregard.

It was something I wanted to explore.  Thoroughly.

I put ’Tato on his leash and started to leave the park.

Heath took my arm like it was the most natural thing in the world.

It didn’t feel natural.  It did, however, feel good.

I found myself leaning into him.  Even with that small contact, the back of my arm against his chest, I noticed that he felt amazing, so hard and big.

I’d been married young and never in my life so much as considered having a one-night stand.  That seemed suddenly like an oversight.  Perhaps I needed to do it once, just to try it out.  And Heath was a man who seemed more than capable of making it worth my while.

Rough, dirty, sheet-clawing sex fairly radiated off him.

And I wasn’t forgetting for even one millisecond about those magnum condoms.

“Don’t make me regret this,” I told him quietly, stealing a glance at his face.

His mouth quirked up.  I was already learning things about him, and one was that he never smiled with his eyes.

They stayed cold, always.

I should have been more worried about that.

“You won’t,” he assured me, voice quiet and steady.  “And you won’t forget it, either.”

I took a deep breath, looking ahead, blinking rapidly.  He was arrogant.  Why did that turn me on so much?

“What do you do for a living?” I asked him, figuring I should know something about him.

“I work in security.”

That could have meant anything, really.  “Care to be more specific?” I prodded.

“Not particularly.”

Well, that was to the point.

“What do you do for a living?” he shot back.

“I’m a photographer.”

“Care to be more specific?”

I almost smiled.  “Specifically, I photograph everything.  People, places, things.  I’m freelance, and I basically work with whatever catches my eye.”

“You could say I’m freelance, as well.  See how much we have in common?”

Not one thing.  Still, it didn’t make me want to turn around.

Or if it did, the slow burn that had started low in my belly overshadowed it too completely for me to linger on it.

Hopefully this sudden desire I had for a bit of strange wouldn’t blow up in my face.

Something occurred to me.  “Maybe we should go to your place instead.”

It seemed wiser not to let him know where I lived.

Another humorless smile.  “It’s not big enough for that dog of yours.  Let’s drop him off at your house first.”

I chewed on that for a bit, but I decided that it didn’t really matter.

More than anything, he seemed like the kind of guy that you had to worry about never seeing again, the opposite of the kind you couldn’t keep from staying away.

“How long have you lived in Vegas?” I asked him, still grasping for a bit of common ground.

“Not long at all.  What about you?”

“I’ve always traveled a lot for work, but I’ve had a house here for over a decade.  I only started staying here fulltime in the last year or so, though.  Been taking a break from traveling, but it won’t last forever.”

I was babbling.  Why was I telling him so much?  He clearly wasn’t going to reciprocate, and he likely didn’t care about anything I was saying.

“Why were you taking a break?” he asked, as though he was interested.

I’d have figured he was just being polite, but I already knew him well enough to understand that he was never polite.

“I . . . went through an ugly divorce, over a year ago, and I decided to stay in one place for a bit, get my head on straight.”

“Vegas is an interesting place to stay to try to get your head on straight.”

That made me laugh because it was very true.  Still, somehow it worked for me.  “My boys enjoy it, and they enjoy staying in one place.  I took them everywhere with me when they were kids.”

“Do they live with you?”

“No, but they live close and visit often.”

“So now they hate to travel?”

“No, I think they still love it, I just think they’re more well-rounded than I am.  What about you?”

“I enjoy traveling, and I’ve done a fair amount of it.”

That was it, nothing else.  He wasn’t a sharer.

“Where did you live before Vegas?”

“Here and there.”

“Which was your favorite?  Here or there?”

I got a slightly bigger smile for that one.  “Here.  Right here.  Do you have any other pets?”

Hello, random.  “No.  Just ’Tator here.  How about you?”

“No pets.  No kids.”

I’d figured.  He didn’t seem the type to have any attachments at all, let alone dependents.

I turned my head slightly and found his eyes on me, full of a disconcerting razor-sharp focus.

It was so disconcerting, in fact, that I began to question what I was doing.  This wasn’t me.  I’d felt a surprising surge of lust and let it temporarily cloud my judgement.

“Knock it off,” he said lightly, or as lightly as he could with that gravelly, bar brawler voice of his.  “Quit thinking so hard.  I told you, you won’t regret this.  You might be too sore to walk without a limp tomorrow, but you’ll be happy about it.”

Something heady and electrifying shot through me.

My nostrils flared, and my breath grew short.

He’d guessed what I was thinking.  That, and all of the sexy, arrogant things he’d just spouted, had me back to being too turned on to think properly.

A man that knew how to read a woman.  That combined with his knockout body and those magnums, well, I couldn’t help it, expectations were getting very unrealistic.

This was not good.  It’d been too long for me, and it had just occurred to me that I was a bit desperate.

I missed penis.  I liked penis, and this sexy creature apparently had an impressive one.  The inner hussy that I never knew I had wanted badly to see it.  See it, and a lot of other things that flashed through my head quite vividly.

Beyond my impeccable instincts and against my better judgement, I kept right on walking with him, all the way to my front door.

I let him into my house, and he prowled inside.

I followed him, letting ’Tato off his leash.

’Tato bolted straight for the kitchen, then out his oversized doggy door into the backyard.

Acutely aware of the eyes burning holes into my back, I went into the kitchen, washed up, and got a pot of coffee brewing.

When I turned to look at him, Heath was leaning against my counter, bulging arms crossed over his chest.  It didn’t even feel like my kitchen anymore with him in it.

The man staked his claim on everything.  He owned whatever space he occupied.

That sparked a visual that made me shiver, head to toe.

He just watched me, eyes way too intense, not even a hint of a smile on his mouth.

“Come here,” he said, voice low and guttural.

The most unnerving shock went through me, but I went.

I was standing almost close enough for our chests to touch when he reached up with one hand, gripped my thick braid, and began to wrap it around his heavy fist.  He did this until his knuckles were digging into my scalp and then he pulled a little harder.

It stung, but it wasn’t the sort of pain you wanted to shy away from.  Not at all.  It was the kind you wanted to lean into, to explore to its fullest, because you knew that just on the other side of that pain was intense pleasure.

“How rough can you take it, Lourdes?” he asked, bringing his mouth very close to mine.

I was trying not to pant.  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly.  “Why don’t you show me what you got?”

He smiled, and this time, it very nearly reached his eyes.  “You asked for it.”