Chapter 13 Mila
Chapter 13
Mila
The question sticks with me, annoying and embarrassing, like a seed stuck between my front teeth.
Has my self-confidence really eroded away to nothing? Did I do it to myself? Have I allowed my experiences to grind me down?
“You okay?” From across the table, Fin watches me, his glass paused in the air.
“Sorry.” I pull my head from my thoughts. “I zoned out. Watching the sunset.” The sky is beautiful, not that I was paying it my full attention, my thoughts turned inward, rather. But I am looking at the sky now, the expanse a wash of watermelon and violet as the sun’s hazy tangerine orb descends over the horizon.
I thought he might kiss me as we frolicked in the ocean. And despite all my protestations, I thought I might let him.
We dragged ourselves from the water, wrinkled and breathless, and I forced myself not to reach for my sarong. No need to channel Smurfette. Plus, I decided to make the effort to be braver. I definitely feel braver after absorbing his praise. Fin swiped up the pink fedora and stuck it on my wet head, announcing, “You wear the hat, you ride the cowboy.”
I didn’t like to point out that the hat was mine, which would surely mean ...
No need to mention that.
When he suggested a walk along the beach, we moved toward the volcanic outcrop. I found myself gasping, and for the briefest moment, I forgot I wasn’t on my actual honeymoon. There, just beyond the dark rocks, in an Instagram-worthy setting, was a white-muslin-draped pergola. A uniformed server waited to seat us with a warm deference and champagne cooling in a silver bucket.
Dinner on the beach, watching the sunset. How dreamily romantic, right?
“I wonder who did the rose petals,” I say, now glancing down at the sand. Was this preordered for Evie and Oliver? Or did Fin do this for me? I mean, for our ruse.
“Looks a little like a pentagram,” Fin replies at the precise moment I bring my champagne glass to my lips.
I cough-swallow a mouthful of bubbles. Pressing my fingers to my chest, I try not to die due to a lack of air and an excess of bubbles as they burn my throat. Fin frowns and makes to move, aborting the movement when I give my head a tiny shake.
“I’m okay. But, yuck! A little of that came out of my nose.” I glance down at the petals again. “I was wondering what the pattern reminded me of.”
The petals are red and laid out in swirls, not quite a geometric pattern, but the addition of strategically placed candles does give it a let’s summon a demon for shits and giggles effect.
We’re served dinner as though dining in a Michelin -starred restaurant in the middle of London, not sitting in our damp swimwear, hair wild with seawater and salt. Mine, anyway. The food is amazing—grilled lobster with a side of melted garlic butter. French beans and dark rye bread, and whoever said you don’t make friends with salad never had one that tasted like spring rolls in a bowl. I need the recipe, because that salad and I are destined to be besties.
“Try this.” Fin holds out a delicate cake fork with a morsel of chocolate torte balanced on the tines. The waiter offered us both a trio of miniature desserts, though I declined mine. The bread—I ate so much of it.
“Why do you keep trying to put things in my mouth? First it was the butter,” I add quickly, flustered by his incendiary expression. I couldn’t resist as he offered me the morsel on oven-warmed bread. My thighs can attest I’m a sucker for fresh bread.
“Was I wrong about the butter?” he asks, lowering the fork a touch.
“It was the best butter I’ve ever tasted. So salty, rich, and creamy.”
“Stop that,” he says in a low, warning tone.
I give my lashes an innocent flutter. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t.” He gives his head a slow, disparaging shake.
“Fine.” I drop my gaze to the fork before lifting my eyes. “Just this one time I’ll let you put it in my mouth.”
Fin barks out the kind of laugh that feels like a glug of good whisky in my chest. He lifts the fork again, and like a good baby bird, I open.
“Oh, my days,” I practically moan—and not to tease him either! The mouthful is light, a fluffy—a chocolatey—heaven.
“Good, right?”
“ Mmm ,” I agree, pressing my fingers to my lips.
“Eating is one of life’s great pleasures. After sex, of course.”
I roll my eyes despite loving the way he’s watching me. Like he’s the one enjoying dessert.
“So eat the damn torte,” he says, pushing his dainty dessert platter to the center of the table. “Then try the citrus tart.”
“But I’m full!”
“Then why were you eyeing my plate like it owed you money?”
“I can look. It doesn’t mean I have to taste.”
“Yeah. I feel that,” he says in that low tone again. “Suffer it anyway.”
I frown a frown that’s in total opposition to the sensations rioting through me. Once more, I’m sure my nipples could put an eye out. I hunch forward in my seat.
“Come on. Just a little more,” he cajoles as he forks the torte. “You can take it. For me.”
“When you put it that way, how can I resist?”
“Beats me,” he murmurs, leaning closer.
“Oh, my God.” I press my fingers to my lips as I slide the fluffy sweetness around in my mouth. “That is just ...”
“The result of a French pastry chef.”
“Is he single?” I ask, pressing my hand over my still-moving mouth because, the flavors!
“You’re not.”
“What? Oh.” I appear to consider his answer. “Only for the purposes of this visit. But I think I could be really into a man who can cook.”
“Did your ex cook?”
I give a theatrical sigh. “He tossed salads.”
Fin appears to choke and, grasping his napkin, coughs into it.
“What?”
“What?” he answers, his eyebrows almost hiding in his hairline.
“What was that? What’s funny about tossing salads?”
“Nothing,” he says, more composed now.
“Because I did all the chopping and stuff, and ... eww.” I pull a face as the penny drops. “You’re nasty!”
“Hey, I’m not the one talking about—”
“Nasty!” I repeat. Balling up my napkin, I throw it at him and half expect him to make me a tactless offer, when the tone of our conversation changes.
“Was he a chauvinist or just not very adept in the kitchen?”
I pause to consider this. “A chauvinist. No. He was controlling. Covertly controlling, I now realize.”
“How so?”
“His actions were stealthy.” My mind turns inward as I consider my lack of friends. I had friends before I met Adam, and I socialized with them in the early days of our relationship. And then I didn’t anymore, without even grasping what had happened. Granted, I had a lot on my plate with Trousseau and Baba, not that she was showing full symptoms of her illness. In the early days I put her erratic behavior down to quirkiness and just old age. I wasn’t living with her, so I suppose it was harder to spot.
“I don’t actually have any friends,” I begin again, ignoring the sharp poke of shame from my admission. “And that’s down to him.” My tone is pondering as I piece together my thoughts. “It’s not as though he ever said ‘I forbid you’ when I wanted to go out with them, because that would’ve been too obvious. He would’ve been rumbled, right?”
Across the table, Fin says nothing but observes all, his expression inscrutable. I press my elbow to the table and my chin to my palm.
“He slowly isolated me from them. Pouting and giving me the silent treatment if I made plans. Making comments about how great it was when just the two of us were cuddled on the sofa on Saturday nights, and how girls out together are only interested in the attention of men.” I shift uncomfortably in my seat . “I fell for it, like a Pavlovian response, and that’s why I have no friends. I just didn’t realize what was happening at the time.”
“Manipulators go out of their way to make sure you don’t notice. They’re experts at using guilt and manipulation. Gaslighting the hell out of you, making you question yourself. Don’t feel down on yourself,” he adds, probably reading my expression. “It’s because you’re a good person you didn’t realize how fucked in the head he is.”
“How do you know?”
“I was raised by a manipulator,” he replies, reaching for his glass.
“Oh.” That’s quite an insight. There’s obviously more to Fin than meets the eye. I mean, of course there is. But it doesn’t mean I should examine it—him—because this isn’t real. But still, being manipulated as a matter of course by a caregiver seems much worse. I might not have had the easiest time growing up, but at least I knew Baba put me and my well-being first. “It’s insidious, isn’t it, how it happens?”
“Manipulators are cunning.”
“He’d oh-so-subtly try to control me, bringing up my insecurities, making me feel horrible about myself. The things he said—the salad obsession and ‘You’re eating chocolate? Again?’—never came from a place of caring or concern. It wasn’t even about my health or fitting into my clothes. It was just to make me feel bad about my appearance.”
“To knock your confidence,” Fin adds. “Because he had to make himself feel better somehow, right?” He takes a mouthful of his drink and puts down his glass. “He was intimidated by you.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“People only put others down because they’re insecure. The smaller you feel, the less confident and competent, the better they feel about themselves. Your ex did a damn good job of making sure you wouldn’t leave him.”
“Ah, but he left me.”
“Then he did you a favor in the end.”
“I know that, but ...” My chest feels tight, and I realize I’m fighting tears. “His timing could’ve been better, given he almost made me homeless. I feel so supremely stupid when I think of how I trusted him and how he treated me. Why did I put up with that?”
“Like you said, it happened without you realizing. And I’d like to correct you on one thing. You do have a friend. You have me.”
“My accidental husband,” I say, biting back an awkward smile. “I’m not sure our friendship will thrive, let alone survive this experience. You’re very annoying, you know.”
Fin settles back in his chair. “I’ll take that over ambivalence.”
My gaze dips to the remains of Fin’s dessert. I scoop my finger through the rich chocolate torte and bring it to my mouth. “I think I could cope with a gay husband if he made me food like this.”
“Is that my cue to take a culinary course?”
“Cute.” The word hits the air in a small huff as I dig in a second time. This time, when I look up, Fin’s gaze is dark. Hungry. And not for torte. Flustered, I reach for my champagne glass.
“It might be worth it,” he murmurs. “Watching you eat feels like a sexual experience.”
“That’s . . . weird.”
“Is it? I guess I just like to see you enjoying yourself.”
My body heats, flushed with pleasure. Yet I feel awkward and self-conscious at the same time. Not because he’s watching but maybe because he’s paying attention. Caring. The word whispers in my mind. Reaching for my champagne glass, I bring it to my lips. “Enough to let me marry a gay pastry chef?”
“We could just take him home?” Leaning back in his chair, he makes an expansive motion.
I pretend to consider it, tilting my head. Then I imagine Fin kissing another man. Hot or not? It’s hard to tell, given my brain seems to have made me the other man. “That sounds a bit kinky,” I find myself answering eventually.
Fin laughs. Smuttily.
“I meant I could employ him back in London. While I’d love to make all your fantasies come true, maybe we can table that one for a special date. Say, our thirtieth wedding anniversary.”
“Very funny.” But again, I’m pink with pleasure. The man is very practiced in his craft. And I need to remind myself of that. “I think I’d rather have cake than sex, anyway.” My hand flies to my mouth as I chuckle behind it. “Is there truth serum in this?”
“Not by that answer.”
“Shows what you know,” I retort smoothly.
“I know you like sex, same as I know you like cake. But it seems to me you enjoy one more over the other.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it, because last night doesn’t count.”
He slides me a doubtful look.
“Because I don’t remember.”
“Want a reminder? Right here? Right now?”
I pull a face. “Tempting, but I’m sure the sand would be uncomfortable.”
“Say the word, and I’ll carry you back to the suite.”
“You’d have a heart attack carrying me up all those stairs. I’ll just stick to cake, thanks.”
“And what about the closet?” he all but purrs.
“We didn’t have sex there.”
“And you didn’t enjoy it either.” He gestures to my glass. “That’s not truth serum.”
Just as well, not-Ronny whispers.
“But getting back to the other thing.” He leans a little closer across the table. “What the fuck.” His dark tone sends a beetle skittering down my spine. “He made you homeless?”
“I couldn’t afford the rent on my own.” Thanks to Trousseau’s downturn. “I didn’t know how he’d manage it either. Obviously, because I didn’t know he had another woman waiting in the wings.” Maybe I shouldn’t be telling him any of this. He’s not really my friend. I don’t want his pity, and I’m sick and tired of feeling like a blind idiot.
“What a fucking asshole.”
I startle as Fin sits suddenly forward but release a long breath when I realize he’s just topping up my glass. The angry look on his face is real enough, though.
“It’s not as though I found myself on a park bench or anything.”
“I’m gonna ruin him,” he says, leaning back in his chair.
I make a weird ha ha sound, because that’s just nonsensical. Even if he looks like he’s enjoying the prospect. “I just moved in with my grandmother.”
“Baba Roza, right?”
“Yes,” I say, slightly disconcerted. “How do you know?”
“You mentioned her name last night.” His expression doesn’t flicker. It doesn’t reveal a hint of what else I might’ve said. “You told me your father’s family is from Macedonia and that your mom’s people were from Cornwall.”
I nod, not sure what to say. This feels so unnatural. We’ve had sex; we’re married, even; but we barely know a thing about each other. Well, he seems to know a bit more about me. Did I tell him I had to put Baba in a care home? That guilt gnaws at my soul?
“I lost my parents when I was young,” he says. “We have that in common.”
I bite my tongue against asking if he’s reading my mind or my face. I bet his grandmother wasn’t almost sixty when she took over his care. Or an immigrant with an accent as thick as her saggy woolen stockings.
I used to feel deep embarrassment when she’d come to my school’s open evenings. Her headscarf would be fastened tight under her neck and her darned cardigan buttoned right under it. When times were tough, I wore shoes with tattered toes and cardboard-stuffed soles, and I felt ashamed. But Baba had a deep fear of the state, I now know. I’m sure we would’ve been entitled to government benefits, but she feared they might take me away. So we made do. I wore other children’s castoffs and would open my lunch box to cold toasted sandwiches filled with feta cheese and marinated bell peppers. Sounds quite bougie by today’s standards, but back then, all I wanted in the world was a little plastic pot of Kraft’s Lunchables.
I know Baba was doing her absolute best. She just came from a different time and a different place. She uprooted her life, moved from her village—the only home she’d ever known—to look after me. The least I can do now is repay that care.
“Do you still live with your grandmother?”
Can’t we go back to laughing over misunderstandings and threesomes with the French pastry chef? It’s hardly a sexy question. The answer even less so.
“I’m still living in her flat. But not for much longer.” Under the table, I cross my fingers. Please let it be so. At least now I’ll have money, which means I’ll also have choices. “My business was struggling.” I shrug.
Fin’s expression turns pensive, which is better than sympathy. “Breakups are a lot.”
“True story.” My gaze dips as I draw my finger through the condensation on my glass. “It wasn’t because of the breakup, though I’m sure it couldn’t have helped. I didn’t cancel on my clients. They canceled on me.” I feel my brows knit, my mind wandering down that well-trodden path of how . “Now that I think of it, the cancellations began not long after we met.”
“Maybe the financial downturn? It’s been hard on people.”
I give my head a quick shake. “Not the kind of people I was dealing with. Money wasn’t an issue for them. Some of them even forfeited their entire fees. There are no refunds after a certain period in the contract, you see.” At least I still got paid for those.
“Did you have many cancellations?”
“Yes,” I admit, glancing up. “And then future bookings started to fail.”
“Did you ask your clients why they canceled?”
“The ones who would return my calls,” I reply. “Not that they were very forthcoming. The ones I managed to speak to were cold—icy cold, come to think of it. But I had other things going on. I didn’t have the brain space to dwell, because my grandmother ...” There are too few words and too many thoughts for me to adequately explain.
I knew Baba’s health was beginning to fail, but it took living with her again to notice that her mind was failing too. There was, and there is, a lot of guilt with those realizations. She gave up her life to look after me, and when the time came that she needed me to pay attention to her, I was too wrapped up in my own problems to notice.
“Tough times,” he says softly.
“Yeah. It sounds strange, but I wondered for a time if what was going on with my business might somehow be linked to the night we met.”
“How do you mean?” Fin tilts his head as though he doesn’t want to miss a thing.
“I’m not sure, really. The timing, I suppose. I know it was just a coincidence, but I did consider it. Remember I told you how I heard about Adam’s engagement?”
“Yeah.”
“So I was hiding in the closet after one of the chefs told me Adam had just proposed.”
“Because he didn’t have the balls to tell you himself,” he repeats, his disgust still very evident.
“Well, I suppose I lost my composure.”
Lost your shit, more like, not-Ronny counters.
“I can see that happening.”
“The news of his engagement was just the tip of a very nasty iceberg. You see, as far as they were concerned—the kitchen crew and the waitstaff, the management, even—Adam had been single the whole time we were engaged. And that’s why the chef added how surprised they all were that Rachel, the ex–duty manager, had accepted his proposal.” I inhale deeply. “You see, Adam had boned half of the hotel’s servers that year.”
“Oh, Mila.”
“So not only did I find out he was engaged just weeks after our split, which was suspicious enough, but I also discovered he’d been chronically unfaithful. It wasn’t just that hotel either. He’d been flaunting his infidelity right under my nose. Probably for years.”
“Ah, shit.”
“It was a bit shit,” I answer breezily as I ignore my burning cheeks and the poke of discomfort in my chest. I feel like such an idiot recounting this. “He let me get excited about our wedding. He let me waffle on about colors and flowers, make a down payment on catering, and even buy a dress. And all the while, he had no intention of getting married. Not to me, anyway.”
“That is fucked up. So fucked up.”
“So I wondered ...” I straighten the dessert plate an inch, move my napkin from the right of the table to the left. Anything rather than see his pity. “Wondered if the news somehow got out that I’d completely lost it in the hotel kitchen. That I shouted and I cried and cursed and basically made a holy show of myself. I wondered if that’s why—if I’d been deemed mentally unstable. I mean, it was completely out of character and so unprofessional. I was mortified the next day, and for many days afterward.”
But in the moment, I was just unhinged. Crazed. “Hell hath no fury” and all that. Even later, when I found myself accompanied in the coat closet, the experience felt unreal. Like an out-of-body experience, almost.
“You didn’t hear anything about it by any chance, did you?” I ask, meeting his gaze finally.
Fin shakes his head. Pissed on my behalf, he’s all dark, stormy eyed and tense jawed.
I try not to like his reaction too much.
“It was just a theory,” I say with a small shrug. “A brief theory, but none of the guests can have seen or heard, really. It was after dinner, so most of them were already smashed.”
“Were you hoping you could patch things up? That he’d change his mind, maybe?”
“God, no. We’d been over for a few weeks at that point. I wasn’t grieving him, because I’d already begun to examine how he’d manipulated me.” How I’d misconstrued his behavior for love in the beginning and how it had just become the norm. How stupidly willing I was to overlook all that just because I didn’t want to be alone. No friends, barely any family, and lurking at the back of my mind was the realization that, once Baba left the world, I’d have no one. I shiver as though something unpleasant has just scuttled down my spine. Death is a part of life, but that doesn’t mean I want to think about it.
“Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”
“It took a little distance to truly see, but in that moment, I was so angry. How fucking dare he? After my outburst, I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with a wedding and all that outpouring of love.”
“Drunken or otherwise,” Fin puts in with a sad smile.
“Exactly. The wedding was over, but for sore heads and next-day regrets. So I swiped a bottle of champagne and hid in the coat closet where no one would find me.”
“No one but me.”
I give in to a small smile. “You were the highlight of my night.” And I’d been living on that memory since.
“And the dread of it when I turned up here again.”
“I thought I’d hidden my feelings quite well.”
At this, he laughs.
“It’s strange how things turn out sometimes.”
“And sometimes, though they hurt, they turn out for the best in the end.”
“I suppose. The night we broke up, Adam said he loved me but that he wasn’t in love with me.”
Fin grimaces. Such a terrible cliché.
“I asked him why he’d proposed when he didn’t love me, how he could let me plan my wedding. But he just kept banging on about how he’d been lying to himself. No mention of lying to me. Or even an apology.” I roll my suddenly tense shoulders, my anger rising like a spark from a tinderbox.
Enough. I can’t believe I just spewed all my personal ick. My deepest, darkest secrets. How I was taken in by Adam for all those years.
“Story time over.” I give a brittle-feeling smile. I sit straighter in my chair and try to decipher Fin’s expression. There’s sadness and, urgh , pity. “You don’t have anything to add?” I ask lightly. “No quip to make me laugh?” Please make me laugh. “Maybe you’d like to offer me a quick shag, just so I can kick you under the table?”
“You can kick me if it makes you feel better.”
My heart plummets, and tears suddenly prickle.
“Your ex isn’t just a manipulative asshole. He’s fucking cruel.”
I grab my napkin and twist it between my fingers, forcing back the ball of emotion creeping up my throat. “I bet you can’t believe we’re having this conversation. I know I can’t. I feel a bit like a geyser—not a geezer ,” I amend in my version of Cockney patois. “This is the first time I’ve really talked about it. With anyone.”
“We can talk about it for as long as you want.”
“Why are you so nice?”
His face. It’s like I’ve insulted him.
“What’s wrong with nice ?”
“It’s what every man wants to hear.” His reply sounds like a roll of the eyes. He rocks back in his chair and stretches, clasping his hands to the back of his head.
“I’m sorry. Did I tweak your masculine sensibilities with a compliment?”
“ Nice is not a compliment.”
“Yes, it is. Being called nice is nice. I like it when someone says I’m—”
“Nice? No, honeybuns. Nice means you can’t come up with anything more positive. And I know you can.” His eyes move hotly over me.
“ Nice is good,” I protest as my heart begins to canter.
“So I’m nice?”
“That’s what I said, didn’t I?”
“Nice what? Nice looking? I have nice manners? Nice teeth? A nice cock?”
“You’re nice when you’re not talking,” I retort.
“How about this for an entirely nice proposition?” His voice is all husk and gravel suddenly.
I hold up my finger— pause, please —reach for my glass, and drain it. Something tells me I might need it. “Go on.”
“I’m so nice, I think you should consider having sex with me.”
I snort. “That is not news.”
“I’m serious.”
“Of course you are.” Why do I sound like an indulgent aunt?
“I think you should have sex with me for no other reason than you want to.”
“ I want to?”
“Sure, I do too,” he admits, with a flick of his shoulder.
“Of course you do!” I find my hands in the air, my amusement feigned. Because what I really feel is a lot more complicated. What I remember from last night makes me want to press my lips, my fingerprints into his skin.
“Meaning?”
“That’s you. You’re all about casual relationships,” I retort, twirling my hand in the air like I’m winding a bobbin. “And hooking up.”
“Only, we’re married.” He’s all lounging, tawny, and relaxed. Like a lion pretending he’s not about to pounce.
“Well, I’m not your pity project.”
“I don’t pity you, sweetness. I want to fuck you. This is about you and me and how amazing we were together. I got the sense it was cathartic for you, that maybe you needed it. You deserve to let go, and you ought to be desired. And I want and desire you like nothing else.”
“No one needs sex,” I say, trying not to hang on to his reasoning like it’s a lifeboat. I am my own captain, dammit.
“We all need connection.”
“Some of us more than others,” I add under my breath. “Thank you for the very nice offer, but no thank you.” This wasn’t as easy to say as my delivery made it sound.
“Just think about it. Five whole days and five nights to realize all those fantasies.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words come out of my mouth with horns.
“Yeah, you do. You’re just a little surprised that I know too.”
“Shrooms must make a girl fanciful.”
“I could be your holiday romance. The one you packed your fancy wedding panties for.”
“Oh, yes,” I splutter, “because boffing for five days solid sounds so romantic.”
“Come on, honeybuns. You know better than that.”
“Stop calling me that! I’m still trying to work out why bunny ,” I add in an unhappy mutter.
“I could tell you. If you ask me. Nicely.”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
Despite my dismissive words, I get a shimmery feeling in my chest when he laughs.
Sex with Fin would be amazing. I remember enough to know that without a doubt. Why else would I have spent months thinking of him and a dark closet?
But I can’t say yes, no matter how tempting he is. Five days might not be long enough to fall in love, but it’s perfectly long enough to ruin things. If Oliver Deubel finds out, one night might already be enough. I push the unhelpful thought away. I’m so close to the end of my troubles, and sex with Fin is not a chance I’m willing to take.
But when I think about returning to London, everything seems so gray and heavy. Hard and inevitable, like my choices will be stripped away. Right now, I’m living my version of champagne wishes and caviar dreams. I just can’t afford to indulge.
This golden man and his golden existence can’t understand. Not even in his worst nightmares could he imagine what it’s like to live my life. He probably couldn’t even name a social housing estate in London, let alone have stepped foot in one. He can’t know what it is to run the daily gauntlet of street-dwelling criminals, their presence frightening and their catcalls predatory. I’m certain that, in his perfectly posh corner of London, wherever that is, he’s never heard his neighbor beat his wife to a bloody pulp through an adjoining wall.
There can be no fantasies realized for me, no holiday romance. I need to grab this opportunity, not risk it. Grab it with both hands, claw my way out of this life for the second time.
I clear my throat, suddenly realizing Fin is watching me.
“Maybe I should just call you puddin’ .”
“Like dessert?” Because I ate too much of it? I think darkly.
His gaze moves over me in something that feels like a promise. It leaves every inch of my skin tingling and wanting as my foolish body fights my brain.
“Because you’re the dish I want to lick.”
His words make me feel like his tongue is already inside me.
“I imagine that sounded better in your head,” I lie as I sit forward to ease the empty ache between my legs. “Maybe the problem is yours. Could it be the thought of not having sex for a whole week?”
A tiny crease forms between his brows.
“Is that why you’re relentless. Are you feeling a little desperate, Fin?”
“I had sex yesterday, so ... there goes that theory.”
God, I am such a sucker for those hot, intense looks of his. “I’m just sorry your come-ons have no discernible effect on me,” I say, leaning back in my chair once more.
He sighs as he puts his elbow to the tabletop and his chin to his fist. “Then I guess only your nipples are into me.”