His Private Pleasure. Donna Kauffman

know that.”

      He shrugged. “Your choice.”

      She grinned. “So maybe I will ask. Later.”

      “I suppose we both have some stories to tell. If that’s how you want to spend the evening.”

      “Depends. What else did you have in mind?”

      “Dinner. And—”

      She raised a hand. “I might be willing to sit and wait, but I draw the line at cooking.”

      “Ever?”

      “I don’t recall us discussing more than this one dinner at the moment.”

      “At the moment, huh? I’ll keep that in mind, too.”

      “Oh, I doubt you forget much of anything.”

      “You’d be right. You like grilled steak and a good red wine?”

      “Add a tossed salad and we have a date.”

      “Deal.”

      “What else?”

      “What else what? You want the dessert menu?”

      She laughed. “I could make the obvious statement, but that would be way too easy. What I meant was, you started to say something else earlier. Dinner and what?” Something told her he hadn’t been going to say “hot sweaty monkey sex.” Although she might have been perfectly fine with that.

      “Dinner. And an evening spent talking on the front porch, watching the sunset.”

      “Sounds very nice. I guess we can discuss that dessert thing during our porch talk, hmm?”

      He grinned and dangled the key. “I guess we can.”

      She didn’t take the key, not right away.

      “I’m offering to be part of your adventure,” he said, looking at her in such a direct way she couldn’t help but stare back. “Nothing more, nothing less.”

      Liza was used to being the one in charge, the one calling the shots, the one jacking up the atmosphere until the man in her sights was reduced to a quivering mass of need. Needs he believed—in that moment, anyway—only she could fulfill. She was never the one trying to sort out the dizzying swirl of emotions. Never the one reduced to taking what was offered.

      Of course, once she got him alone, there was nothing to say she couldn’t be the one in charge, the one driving the course of the evening’s activities. He’d told her he was willing to be a participant in her adventures, hadn’t he?

      So why, when he pressed the key into her palm, were her fingers the only ones trembling?