“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” He pushed away from the door and moved by her into the kitchen. His feet were bare. “I just put on a pot of coffee. Want some?”

“No. By two, I’ve usually moved on to Diet Coke.” She followed close behind, her gaze taking in his broad shoulders. The arms of his T-shirt fit snuggly around the bulge of his biceps, and the ends of his sandy blond hair touched the ribbed collar at the base of his neck. There was no doubt about it. Sebastian was a man’s man. A guy. While Lonny had been particular about his clothing, Sebastian slept in his.

“My dad doesn’t drink Diet Coke.”

“I know. He’s an RC Cola man, and I hate RC.”

Sebastian glanced back at her and moved around the old wooden table stacked with notebooks, legal pads, and index cards. A laptop lay open, and a small tape recorder and three cassettes sat next to a BlackBerry. “He’s the only person I know who still drinks RC,” he said as he opened a cupboard and reached for a mug on the top shelf. The bottom edge of his T-shirt pulled up past the waistband of his jeans, riding low on his hips. The elastic band of his underwear looked very white against the tan skin of his lower back.

The memory of his bare behind flashed across her brain, and she raised her gaze to the back of his sleep-tousled hair. That morning at the Double Tree, he hadn’t been wearing underwear. “He’s a very loyal consumer,” she said. The memory of that morning made her want to sink into the floor and hide. She hadn’t had sex with him. While that was a huge relief, she had to wonder what they’d actually done, and how she’d ended up virtually naked. If she thought he’d give her a straight answer, she would ask him to fill in the blank spots.

“More like stubborn,” Sebastian corrected with his back to her. “Very definitely set in his ways.”

But she didn’t believe he’d give her the truth without embellishing it for his own amusement. Sebastian could not be trusted, but that wasn’t exactly news. “That’s part of his charm.” A few feet from him, she leaned her behind against the table.

Sebastian grabbed the carafe with one hand and poured coffee into the mug he held with the other. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”

“Yes.” With both hands, she grasped the tabletop at her hips and purposely let her gaze once again slide down the back of his rumpled T-shirt and the long legs of his jeans. She couldn’t help but compare him to Lonny, but supposed it was only natural. Besides the fact that they were both men, they had nothing in common. Sebastian was taller, bigger, and surrounded by a thick testosterone haze. Lonny was shorter, thinner, and had been in touch with his feelings. Perhaps that had been Lonny’s appeal. He’d been nonthreatening. Clare waited for the ta-da bells to ring in her head. They didn’t.

Sebastian set the carafe down, and Clare turned her attention to the tape recorder by her right hand. “Are you writing an article?” she asked. He didn’t answer, and she looked up.

Sunlight spilled through the kitchen window across his shoulder and the side of his face. It poured across the stubble on his cheek and got tangled in his eyelashes. He raised the mug to his lips and watched her as he blew into the coffee. “Writing? Not really. More like typing and deleting the same opening paragraph.”

“You’re stuck?”

“Something like that.” He took a drink.

“Whenever I get stuck, it’s usually because I’m trying to start a book in the wrong place or I’m going about it from the wrong angle. The more I try to force it, the more I get stuck.”

He lowered the mug, and she expected him to say something deprecating about writing romance. Her grasp on the table tightened as she steeled herself and waited for him to point out to her that what he wrote was important, and to dismiss her books as nothing more than fantasies for bored housewives. Heck, her own mother trivialized her work. She did not expect better from Sebastian Vaughan, of all people.

Instead of launching into a condescending diatribe, however, he looked at her as he had earlier. Like he was trying to figure something out. “Maybe, but I don’t ‘get stuck.’ At least I never have before, and never for this long.”

Clare waited for him to continue. She was ready for him to jump on the literary bandwagon and say something derogatory. She’d been defending herself, her genre, and her readers for so long, she could handle what he threw at her. But he simply drank his coffee, and she tilted her head to the side and looked at him as if she couldn’t figure him out.

Now it was his turn to ask, “What?”

“I think I mentioned yesterday that I write romance novels,” she felt compelled to point out.

He raised a brow as he lowered the mug. “Yeah. You mentioned it, along with the fact that you do all your own sexual research.”

That’s right. Dang it. He’d made her mad, and she’d said things she wished she could take back. Things that were coming back to haunt her. Things said in anger that she’d learned long ago to keep behind the happy facade. “And you don’t have one condescending thing to say?”

He shook his head.

“No smarmy questions?”

He smiled. “Just one.” He turned and set the mug on the counter by his hip.

She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “No. I’m not a nymphomaniac.”

His smile turned into a chuckle, laugh lines creasing the corners of his green eyes. “That isn’t the smarmy question, but thanks for clearing that up.” He folded his arms across his rumpled T-shirt. “The real question is: where do you do all your research?”

Clare dropped her hand to her side. She figured she had a couple ways to answer that question. She could get offended and tell him to grow up, or she could relax. He seemed to be playing nice today, but this was Sebastian. The man who’d lied to her about having sex with him.

“Are you afraid to tell me?” he goaded her.

She wasn’t afraid of Sebastian. “I have a special room in my house,” she lied.

“What’s in the room?”

He looked totally serious. As if he actually believed her. “Sorry, I can’t divulge that sort of information to a reporter.”

“I swear I won’t tell anyone.”

“Sorry.”

“Come on. It’s been a long time since anyone’s told me anything juicy.”

“Told or done?”

“What’s in your kinky sex room, Clare?” he persisted. “Whips, chains, swings, slings, latex body suits?”

Slings? Holy heck. “You seem to know a lot about kinky sex closets.”

“I know I’m not allergic to latex. Other than that, I’m a fairly straightforward guy. I’m not into being beaten or trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.” He pushed away from the counter and took a few silent steps toward her. “Restraints?”

“Handcuffs,” she said as he came to stand a foot in front of her. “Fuzzy, because I’m a nice person.”

He laughed like she’d said something really amusing. “Nice? Since when?”

So, maybe she hadn’t always been nice to Sebastian, but he loved to provoke her. She straightened and looked up past the stubble on his chin and into his green eyes. “I try to be nice.”

“Babe, you might want to put a little more effort into that.”

She felt her temper rise a bit, but refused to take the bait. Not today. She smiled and patted him on his rough cheek. “I’m not going to fight with you, Sebastian. There’s nothing you can do to provoke me today.”

He turned his face and lightly bit the heel of her palm. His green eyes stared into hers and he asked, “Are you sure about that?”

Her fingers curled against his scratchy cheek as a disturbing awareness curled in her stomach. She lowered her hand but could feel the warmth of his mouth and the sharp edge of his teeth in her palm. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure of anything. “Yes.”

“What if I nibbled…” He raised his hand and touched the corner of her mouth. “…here?” The tips of his fingers slid down her jaw and brushed the side of her neck. “And here.” He slid his fingers down the edge of her halter dress and across her clavicle. “And here.”

Her breathing stopped in her chest as she stared up into his face. “Sounds painful,” she managed as shock tightened her throat. It had to be shock, and not the heat of his touch brushing her throat.

“It won’t hurt a bit.” He raised his gaze from her neck to her eyes. “You’ll like it, trust me.”

Trust Sebastian? The boy who’d only been nice to her so he could tease and torture her? Who’d only pretended to like her so he could throw mud on her clean dress and make her cry? “I learned a long time ago not to trust you.”

He dropped his hand to his side. “When was that?”

“The day you wanted me to show you the river and threw mud on my new dress,” she said, and figured he’d no doubt forgotten that day long ago.

“That dress was too white.”

“What?” How could something be too white? If it wasn’t white, it was dingy.

He took a few steps back and grabbed his coffee. “You were always too perfect. Your hair. Your clothes. Your manners. It just wasn’t natural. The only time you were any fun at all was when you were messed up and doing something you thought you shouldn’t.”

She pointed at her chest. “I was plenty fun.” He lifted a dubious brow, and she insisted, “I’m still fun. All my friends think so.”

“Clare, your hair was too tight then and you’re wound too tight now.” He shook his head. “Either your friends are lying to you to spare your feelings or they’re as much fun as a prayer circle.”

She wasn’t going to argue about how much fun she and her friends were, and she dropped her hand to her side. “You’ve been in a prayer circle?”

“You find that hard to believe?” His brows lowered and he scowled at her for about two seconds before the corner of his mouth tilted up and gave him away. “When I was in college, one of the first stories I was sent out to cover involved a group of evangelicals recruiting on campus. They were so boring, I fell asleep on a folding chair.” He shrugged. “It probably didn’t help that I was hung over as hell.”