Off Limits

Chapter 1

"I want you to kiss me."

Tyler West was grateful he had just swallowed his last mouthful of coffee; otherwise he would have spat it all over his laptop in shock.

"I'm sorry?" he spluttered. Of all the words he'd expected to hear that afternoon, those had to be at the bottom of the list. Maybe his endless fantasies involving the beautiful and sexy woman sitting across from him had finally had an effect on his brain and he'd started to hallucinate.

Kate Hamilton, Tyler's good friend and colleague at Housebridge and Associates Architects, looked up at him over the square black rims of her glasses and narrowed her eyes. "You heard me."

Not hallucinating then. Tyler swallowed hard and met her gaze. He wasn't sure he liked where this was going. What the hell was she up to?

"I want you ... no," Kate looked thoughtful, "I need you, to kiss me." She got up from her desk and strode over to stand in front of his. She was wearing that orange dress he liked, the one with the soft fabric that hugged her curves in all the right places.

Tyler shifted uncomfortably in his chair.

"Please, Ty, just quickly. It's important."

She was practically begging.

He let out a nervous laugh and pushed back from his desk, needing to put some distance between them. "I don't kiss women." He hated being so blatantly dishonest, but didn't know what else to do now that she'd confronted him so directly.

Did she suspect that he wasn't ...?

No. She didn't look like she was being vindictive. She looked frustrated, and oddly, a bit desperate. The words that were coming out of Kate's mouth were the same ones he'd been fantasising about hearing for the fourteen months he'd known her. Except usually, in his fantasies, she was naked, and he was just a single, heterosexual man-not her gay colleague and friend.

His imagination had never quite gotten around to solving that particular problem.

He got up and walked across the room under the pretence of taking some papers to the recycling bin.

Kate huffed. "You can make an exception."

"I could," he agreed, stalling. "But I'm not sure why I should." Hopefully that didn't sound as weak to her as it did to him. Was he behaving how a gay man would in the same situation? He honestly had no idea. The whole ruse had become such a mess it was laughable. And he had no idea how to get out of it.

Hell. Maybe he should have handled this a little differently. If he hadn't acted so horrified at her request, he would probably have had his tongue down her throat by now. But, Tyler supposed, that was precisely the problem. He knew that once he got his hands on Kate Hamilton there would be no turning back. He'd thought that he had put an end to the possibility of anything happening between them the first day that they'd met, when he'd told her on no uncertain terms that he was gay. But now she was treading on dangerous territory.

"Because, I have a date tonight."

Tyler frowned. "Shouldn't you be asking your date to kiss you then?" He asked, trying feebly to shove aside the flood of unwelcome thoughts involving Kate and another man.

"Well, I was thinking about it, and that's what got me worried."

Tyler had started back to his desk, but stopped when he saw Kate chewing on her lower lip in thought. Her hair was doing that wavy thing it often did at the end of a long day, when bits started to escape from her ponytail and hang sexily around her face. Probably safer to keep his distance, especially given the current topic of conversation. He turned to the large work table in their office, pretending to examine the floor plans for the project that they were currently working on.