House of Payne: Rude by Stacy Gail

wanton heat it nearly made her knees melt out from under her. When he lifted his head again, this time his breathing was as ragged as hers. “Damn. Just think what it’ll be like when I get you into bed. We’ll set off every fire alarm in the building.”
    Wait.
    Bed?
    When I get you into bed…
    That snapped her out of her kiss-drunk stupor like nothing else, and all at once she became aware of the hard bulge behind his zipper. That wasn’t just any hard bulge.
    That was Rude’s hard bulge.
    “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Without a doubt, this was a four-whoa moment, the first in her adult life. Somehow it didn’t surprise her that Rude was the one who’d made it happen. “Slow down there, cowboy. Even if this was an actual date—which it isn’t —it would be major bad form to jump from the first kiss straight into the sack.”
    “This is an actual date.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous.” Only then did she realize she was clinging to him like he was a life preserver and she was adrift at sea. Belatedly she pushed out of his arms, and was just contrary enough to be irritated that he let her go so. “I don’t date men like you.”
    “What the fuck, Sass.” He folded his arms across a chest she now knew was as hard as a frigging brick wall. “You’d better hurry up and explain yourself. What the fuck do you mean, men like me ?”
    Overwhelmingly masculine men. “Men I don’t like.”
    “That’s bullshit.” The lift of a brawny shoulder shrugged her words away. “It’s not that you don’t like me. It’s just that you don’t know me. If you knew me, you wouldn’t be able to get enough of me.”
    Good God, was he serious ? “No really, I do know you. And what I know, I don’t like.”
    “You knew the little asshole I was back in the day. He vanished a long time ago—so long that it doesn’t even seem like that guy was ever me.”
    Almost against her will, she recalled Frankie’s assertions of Rude enduring such hell that he’d had trouble coming back into the real world and reconnecting with who he’d once been. She knew what that was like, better than he could imagine. But she didn’t know if she wanted to get to know this new Rude, when the old one had left such a sour taste in her mouth.
    “It’s been years since I lived under my parents’ roof with you,” he went on when she remained silent. “And even when I was there, we almost never spoke. So it’s safe to say we don’t know each other. But what little I do know about you, I like.”
    Now he was getting harder to believe. “Now it’s my turn to call bullshit. I haven’t changed that much from the time I was a foster, and you hated me then.”
    “I didn’t hate you. I just hated that you were there taking my bathroom privileges away. And no one stays the same after that amount of time has passed.”
    “Maybe I’m a special snowflake.”
    “I remember the first time I saw you and I said that despite the ‘welcome home’ you got from my folks, you weren’t welcome and you weren’t home ,” he announced without warning, and it surprised her enough to drag her gaze back to him. The bitter regret burning in his eyes took her by surprise. “The look on your face…it was like watching a light blow out. Your eyes went dead and you looked right through me. And you continued to look right through me from that point on.” He moved toward her, and kept on moving when she tried to maintain the distance between them. “I didn’t like being dismissed like that, Sassy. It made me get in your face every chance I could just so you’d acknowledge me.”
    She backed up all the way to the breakfast bar separating the dining room from the kitchen. “I didn’t dismiss you.”
    “Yeah, I know. I know it, because I now understand what that look was all about.” He stopped even as she put out a hand to stop him, palm out and about an inch away from his chest. He leaned in, his hands coming to support his weight on the counter on either