“If it’s all right with you, I’d like to wait until I know you’re okay.”
“But I’m fine,” she said.
He looked down at her with worry evident in his expression. “It would make me feel better.”
Aleena stared up at him for a moment, nodded, and then turned. “I’ll just go change. I’ll be right back. Make yourself at home.”
With a sigh, she closed the bedroom door behind her and yanked off her wet clothes. Then she pulled on the first things she grabbed, a bra, panties, an old pair of pink sweatpants, an old t-shirt, and her slippers. She used a towel to get some of the water out of her hair and then hurried back out to him.
Aleena stood still and watched him as he looked at the pictures on the mantel. He was a large man, but for some reason, he looked even bigger, standing in front of the fireplace.
Even as wet as he was, he stilled looked ruggedly attractive. The shirt he had on was transparent because it was damp, and she was able to see his tan back through it. When she’d glanced at him on the ride there, she’d notice the small patch of hair he had on his chest and the muscle definition he had, showing his strength and vitality.
“Would you like something to drink?”
Kaleb swung around to face her. “Do you have a beer?” he asked.
She shook her head and stared at his chest, unable to look him in the face. “No, I don’t drink alcohol. I have water, juice, pop, or chocolate milk.”
“I’ll take chocolate milk.”
For some reason, that surprised her. She thought back to the last adult she’d seen drink chocolate milk, and she couldn’t remember one. She poured two glass, walked back to him, handed him his glass, and then walked away from him.
She sat in the corner of the sofa closest to the fireplace and pulled a blanket over her lap. She wanted to stare at him, but instead, she looked at him through her lashes so he wouldn’t be able to tell.
“Do you like being a paralegal?”
A shiver took Aleena off guard because of the deep timbre of his tone of voice before her gaze went to him. She didn’t want to look at him because every time she did, her stomach would start to ache, and her panties would get uncomfortably wet.
She knew why, of course. She was twenty-six years old and a college graduate. She’d heard about arousal before. She’d just hadn’t felt it before.
A person couldn’t go through college and not find things out. Her roommate from her first year had different guys over all the time to have sex, and other girls on her floor talked about it all the time.
She also heard Lana talk about arousal and how her body would feel. The changes her body would make when she was attracted to someone. Hearing it from an adult instead of a sex-crazed teenager made a huge difference.
She felt exactly the way Lana had told her she would feel, and that fact startled her, and it just made her uncomfortable because she didn’t know the man at all. The fact he was huge and extremely attractive made her emotions even more pronounced and that much more uneasy. She found it disconcerting that all she had to do was hear the deep timbre of his voice to feel funny.
Her gaze roamed over him. He was a large man, over six feet tall and big-boned. His shoulders were clearly twice the width of hers, and his hands were the size of dinner plates. She could see from the tightness of his dress pants the bulging muscles in his thighs. His dark-brown hair was cut short, and his eyes were hazel. In some light, they looked green and, other times, brown.
She cleared her throat. “Yes, I do very much—” She stopped abruptly.
“What?”
She felt her face heat with a blush. “I’m sorry. I forgot your name.”
He smiled gently. “It’s Kaleb.”
“What do you do?” she asked.
“Several of my friends and I own some businesses together. We all work together and manage them. We also like to find failing businesses to buy and hopefully turned them around.”
“Why do you need more than one?”
“More than one what?”
“Business?”
He shrugged. “I guess we like making money.”
She tilted her head to the side. “How much money do you want?”
“I don’t have a limit set. I just keep working hard because I don’t have anything else.”
“I don’t either.” Her lips turned down. “I have a friend, but she lives a long way away and I never get to see her.”
“I’m sorry, baby. That must be hard.”
Aleena shrugged. “It is. She’s the only friend I’ve had who understood me and liked me just the way I am.”
“How’s that?”
She looked away for a moment to try to find the words she needed. “I don’t like the way women act or how they’re treated. It sometimes confuses and scares me the way men handle them, and the ones I know seem to like it.”
“I know some girls like that. They don’t like the things women their age are doing. They also like to have a man who protects them and helps them with everyday decisions.”
Her eyes widened. “You know of other girls like me?”
“Yes. The friends I told you about. A few of them have girlfriends that like a simpler life, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I like that about you.”
“You do? Why?” Her lack of sophistication usually irritated most people.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure. I guess I need to be in charge, and I want the woman to look to me for everything.”
“Tell me more.”
“I want a woman
