Drop Dead Gorgeous. Kimberly Raye

      Which explained why he’d done little more than flirt with her tonight. Not that she’d wanted him to do more.

      It was the principle that mattered.

      Obviously, like everyone else in town, he just couldn’t see the Hot Chick that Meg had become.

      Not yet.

      Not ever a voice whispered. One she quickly ignored as she devoured two of the three cakes, downed a long sip of wine and snuggled under the sheets.

      If Dillon could convince an entire town full of people he’d known since birth, so could she. Even more, she could be convincing enough to get herself into Tilly’s top ten.

      All she had to do was buckle down, learn everything she could from Dillon, and not jump his bones in the process.

      No problem. Manhandler Meg was ancient history.

      At least that’s what she told herself.

       5

      SHE NEEDED HIM TO SEX her up.

      Even more, she wanted him to sex her up.

      Dillon sat in the small office that housed the administrative portion—aka a desk, a file cabinet and a state-of-the-art computer system—of Skull Creek Choppers and tried to push Meg and her proposition completely out of his head.

      The truth echoed through his head, tightening his groin and stirring the damned need that twisted his gut. He fought against the sensations and tried to focus. He had work to do. He was smack-dab in the middle of developing custom-design software for a new line of choppers being introduced in the Fall.

      He’d spent the past hour since leaving the motel hard at work on the templates that would be the starter point for each bike. At the moment, Jake and Garret were working from a sketch only, crafting the cycles from the ground up and dealing with problems as they arose during the building process. The computer program Dillon was developing would simplify everything and allow them to foresee any structural and/or mechanical problems before they encountered them. They would be able to enter in the measurements and must-haves for each bike. The computer would process the information and put together a cyber model, pinpointing errors and “fixing” them before any actual fabrication. Dillon was just days away from putting the final touches on the program, which meant he didn’t need a distraction right now.

      He stared at a particular line of code, but instead of seeing the sequence of numbers and letters, he saw Meg, her lips so full and kissable, her blue eyes filled with determination.

      A sliver of excitement went through him, followed by a wave of disbelief. He still couldn’t grasp the fact that she’d asked for his help. Thanks to his ability to read minds, he now knew she never asked a man for anything.

      Never demanded or pushed or manhandled.

      Not anymore.

      She’d sworn off any and all aggressive behavior when it came to sex. She wanted a man to lust after her. She wanted to feel desirable and sexy and confident that her own transformation—from pudgy tomboy to curvaceous woman—had been successful.

      Deep down, she wasn’t so sure.

      He’d seen the truth in her gaze, the way he saw everything else about her—she was up to her neck in mortgage payments on her dream house, she had a dog addicted to Twinkies, she loved her job even if it did mean being cooped up most of the day and, thanks to the upcoming prom season, she was certain she would double her profits this year.

      Yes, he saw it all. Her hopes. Her dreams. Her fears—the biggest being that she was doomed to a lifetime of being Manhandler Meg, regardless of how much she tried to change things.

      Which was why she’d asked for help. She needed him.

      Him, of all people.

      The sudden burst of skepticism made him all the more confident in his own decision. He would help her, all right, and teach her his “secret.”

      Not that he was going to sink his fangs into her sweet neck and bring her over to the dark side, not when he had zero intention of staying there himself. He would never do that. He wasn’t sure he even could. He was still learning the ropes from Garret and that wasn’t something the older vampire had ever addressed.

      But while he wouldn’t turn her, he would teach her what he’d learned about seduction since his own turning.

      One of the key factors that made vamps such sensual creatures was that they were fine-tuned to everything. They saw things more vividly, smelled them more intensely. They were aware of even the smallest sound, the briefest touch. While Meg’s senses weren’t supercharged like his, she still had them. If she learned to tap into them more, to use them, trust them, he had no doubt it would boost her sex appeal tenfold.

      Enough to make her irresistible to every man in town.

      The notion stirred a rush of jealousy. Understandable, of course. They were friends. It only made sense that he would feel protective of her. That, and he felt even more aroused than usual because she wasn’t throwing herself at him like every other woman he met. She knew the real Dillon, which made her all the more determined not to sleep with him. Which made him all the more determined to sleep with her.

      Thanks to free will, humans were much more powerful than they realized. While a vampire could, indeed, mesmerize and hypnotize, such supernatural persuasion meant a hill of beans if the subject wasn’t willing.

      Most women wanted to be swept away by passion. Deep down, they longed to experience wild, earth-shattering sex with a charismatic stranger, and so they were wide-open and vulnerable to his seduction.

      Meg wasn’t much different from every woman in that respect, and that was the problem in a nutshell. Dillon wasn’t a stranger and so the last thing, the very last thing she wanted was wild, earth-shattering sex with him.

      If he could seduce her to the point that she saw past the geek he used to be and embraced the hunk he’d become, he would know deep down inside that he truly had been acting all these years. That he wasn’t a loser when it came to women.

      That he wasn’t a loser, period.

      Seducing her would be the ultimate validation.

      Excitement rippled through him. The scent of her strawberry shampoo spiraled through his head and hunger gnawed in his gut. His mouth watered and his muscles tightened and it was all he could do to keep his ass in the chair.

      He had to get a grip and take things slowly. One lesson at a time. Until she reached the point of no return. It might take a day. It might take a week. But eventually she would offer herself to him. Of that he felt certain.

      In the meantime, it was business as usual.

      He spent another fifteen minutes working on the code before closing the design screen and moving on to his second order of business—keeping his promise to Jake and Garret.

      He stared through the wall of windows that separated the office from the fabrication shop. Jake McCann stood near a large metal table that held the skeleton of what would soon be the next custom chopper to roll through the doors of the motorcycle shop. Unlike most of the bikes they’d been doing, this one wasn’t headed for a specific individual. Rather, it was a spec model being sent up north to advertise Skull Creek Choppers to the rest of the country. Jake took a few measurements before walking back over to another table that held a sheet of metal that would soon be the gas tank. He reached for a special tool and started tracing out the measurements.

      Like most every other man in the small Texas town, Jake wore cowboy boots, jeans, a faded Resistol and an easygoing grin. But unlikemost every other man in town, Jakewas the real deal.Abona fide cowboy who’d been turned back in the eighteen hundreds. He’d spent his human life and a good chunk of his afterlife riding andworking horses for a living. In the past decade or so, he’d traded in his horse for a hog.