NICE GIRL TO LOVE (THE COMPLETE THREE-BOOK COLLECTION)(15)

For God’s sakes, she was just so nice.

“So you don’t do anything just for yourself? Just for fun?”

“Well, I have been privately executing my mission to learn how to cook the most beloved dishes from every country in the world,” she returned with a smile. “That’s fun.”

It was possible baby bluebirds helped her get dressed in the morning.

She was just that sweet.

“You’re driving me crazy.” He swept an arm around her waist and lifted her right up onto his lap.

“Connor!”

He slid a hand into her hair, rubbed a thumb over her heated cheekbone as he brought his lips to within inches of hers. “I shouldn’t want you this much. You’re everything I’m not, and I’m everything you couldn’t possibly want. I know I should leave you alone, but I just can’t. I can’t stop myself from wanting you.”

Her breathing had grown so erratic, he was actually starting to get concerned. “Say something, sweetheart. I’m baring my soul here.”

“I shouldn’t want you either,” she whispered, “but I do.”

His arms locked around her, instinctively staking a claim on her. Mine.

For now.

The two words were his only anchor keeping him in the reality he maintained for himself. He had to be brutally honest with her, with them both. “I meant what I said earlier, Abby. I’m never going to break my one-month rule.” Feeling like the lowest piece of scum, he hammered that last nail in, “Not for anyone. Not even you.”

She was silent for a long while, and Connor started preparing himself for the rejection to come.

“I know our fifteen minutes of friendship are up but can I ask you something as a friend? Will you answer me as one?”

He tensed. “I’ll try.”

She chuckled. “Again with the copout.” Raising her warm doe eyes up to his, she asked quietly, “If you weren’t trying to get in my pants, if you were just my friend and I asked you what one thing I could do to stop being ‘a nice girl’ for just a little while, what advice would you give me?”

That was easy. “I’d tell you to try something new. Something that excites you. Something that’ll take you from zero to sixty just as fast as it could take you back to zero whenever you were ready to return.”

“Something wild and fast...” She loosened her death grip on his shoulders, slid her hands down his back slowly. “That’s good advice.”

He saw her gaze travel down to his lips and it took everything he had not to kiss her right then and there.

“Are you volunteering, Connor? To be that something wild and fast for me to try?”

“No,” he replied raggedly, “I’m insisting. Requiring.” He dropped his forehead against hers. “Asking.”

Her eyelids dipped down, veiling her reaction from him.

And so he waited.

“I can’t do a whole month with you.”

He blinked in surprise. That, he hadn’t been expecting. “Why not?!”

“It’s too long.”

Well, he did ask.

A touch indignant, he argued, “You said you don’t do one-night stands. Now you’re saying a month is too long?” He knew he was getting overly worked up but he couldn’t help it, she was being irrational. His brain started firing on all pistons, every combat cell in his body taking a front seat like they always did when he was about to do battle in the courtroom. “Or is it just one month with me that’s too long?”

She flinched.

He felt thoroughly insulted.

“It’s not how you’re making it. Being with you would be like…ice cream. The most decadent ice cream I could ever imagine. I’d be hooked after the first bite. And if I didn’t discipline myself, I’d...overindulge.”

“Until it made you sick?” He wasn’t really good with metaphors.

A smiled peeked through. “No, until it was all I’d want to eat, all day, every day.”

What the hell was wrong with that?

Her smile broadened. “There’s everything wrong with that,” she continued, somehow reading his mind. “One month will take me right up to the third week of teaching, which is generally when my life starts getting busy. That means this month is my only time to really focus on getting a huge chunk of my dissertation written.”

“And if you overindulge on the ice cream…”

“I’d be in a sugar coma, incapable of doing or thinking of anything else. But you.”

Call him a bastard but hearing that felt good. “Fine, I can respect that. How about this? What if I promise to leave you alone all day, every day throughout the week, and only send you into mini ice cream comas at night…as a build-up to one massive, no holds barred weekend to overindulge until we’re both too weak to move? Would that work for you?”

Hot, slick desire exploded in her expression.

His fingers instantly flexed against her hips in response.

“Stand down, counselor. You made your point.”

If she agreed to this arrangement, Connor fully intended to have her bring this legal speak into the bedroom—coming from Abby’s lips it was the equivalent of dirty talk.

“How about we reach a compromise?” She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Two weeks.”