Chapter 7
“She’ll be home soon,” he murmurs to Amelia, who’s been gracious enough to allow him to scratch underneath her chin.
Xavier stares at the bright screen, nudging his blue-light glasses back up his nose. This slide isn’t quite right. It’s been bothering him for weeks now and thus he put it off until everything else felt solid, but even with all that time away, nothing’s changed.
“Fuck it. It’s good enough,” he says, moving on to the next slide that just needs a quick proofread.
No embarrassing spelling mistakes. Grammar is good.
Fantastic.
Moving on.
He’s in the zone, pushing through from slide to slide, for how long he has no idea, when Amelia leaps up and darts straight for the front door.
“Is Mama home?” he muses toward the cat, who is ignoring him completely and waiting patiently just a few feet from the doorway, tail swishing back and forth in an almost canine fashion.
A few seconds later, Bianca’s standing in the doorway, quickly pulling the screen door shut behind her as the cat lunges forward to rub up against her ankles.
She’s wearing some kind of one-piece thing (in a soft green color the same as the shirt he picked for her this morning), shorts with an attached top that’s tied up around her neck to hold it in place because he’s pretty sure the thing doesn’t have a back.
She’s got on a pair of heels that look like they might be able to slit a man’s throat.
Her hair is down in long silky waves, her natural curls starting to poke through despite her efforts to tame them into submission.
The shiny mahogany curtain swings down in front of her as she bends to run a hand over Amelia’s coat and Xavier stifles a groan, trying not to be too jealous of a cat.
From his angle – because yep, it doesn’t have a back – it almost looks like she’s only wearing the heels and absolutely nothing else.
“Hello sweet girl,” Bianca coos. “Did you miss me, Amelia Peabody Emerson? Did you?”
“Amelia Peabody Emerson?” he asks, trying to place the name, momentarily distracting his traitorous mind.
“From the books?”
He shrugs, completely unfamiliar.
“The Amelia Peabody novels, by Elizabeth Peters. My favorite books. They’re like Agatha Christie meets The Mummy , except the protagonist is a Victorian British woman and they were written by an Egyptologist, so the history is spot on.
Actually, I think you’d find them fascinating, especially the later books.
You kind of remind me of one of the characters. ”
“Later books?”
“There are twenty of them.”
He absolutely cannot remember the last time he read anything for enjoyment. “Just a bit of light reading? Maybe when my eyes stop crossing from looking at my own words.”
“That’s fair,” she says and then lifts an assessing eyebrow. “Have you moved since I left?”
Shrugging helplessly, he stands, moving across the living room toward the kitchen; leaning back on the counter across from her, he says, “I went to get some of my stuff and then after, I . . . paced around a little bit while trying to figure out how to rewrite my introduction so I don’t sound like a pretentious twat.
” Her eyes light up at the opening he just gave her, but he shakes his head, cutting her off. “Don’t say it.”
Her shoulders sag in mock disappointment and she closes her mouth, pulling it into a sweet-looking pout.
And now all he wants to do is kiss it away.
Fuck.
It’s always like this – he’s walking around minding his own business and she wrecks him with just a shift of expression.
No one should have that kind of power over anyone, but at least she has no idea she possesses it.
He’s pretty sure she doesn’t, anyway.
If she does, she hasn’t taken advantage of it.
He’d actually kind of like it if she did.
“How were drinks?” he asks, desperate for a change of subject.
“Fine, they were fine,” she says with a tight smile, shrugging one shoulder with indifference. She’s lying and he wants to press her on it, but her eyes seem like they’re pleading with him to leave it alone, so he does.
“And my texts?”
Those desperate eyes light up, those gold flecks flickering merrily at him, and her smile becomes a real one. “A major hit. Five stars. Ten out of ten.”
She leans over, grabbing a water bottle out of the fridge, and he fights down the urge to walk up behind her, run his fingers down the long line of her bare back then find her hips with his hands and tug her against him.
Yeah, that’s definitely over the line that has yet to be defined.
They probably should talk about that again, but still, he vaguely knows where it is, enough to know better than to give in to his current fantasy.
“I should leave you alone to get your work done,” she says, turning around and hopping up onto the kitchen counter.
It’d be easy enough to just take a step forward and then another, nudge her knees apart, run his hands up over her thighs, under the hem of whatever the hell this outfit is called and see where things lead from there.
Instead, he just says, “Nah, I was getting lazy with it, a definite sign I need a break.”
“Oh, okay then, good. Actually, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s something I think we should do.”
“What’s that?”
“We should kiss.”
“Uh . . .”
“Hear me out.”
“Floor’s yours,” he says as if he isn’t already in, as if she’s going to have to convince him.
He shouldn’t be. He should be worried what it’ll mean, for him, for them, but instead of having any sense of self-preservation, all he can manage to care about is whether or not she’s thinking straight.
She doesn’t seem drunk, but . . . he doesn’t want her to regret it tomorrow.
“We’re going to be doing this for two months. Pulling off a lie this big is tough enough, but the more we’re around people, the more casual affection they’re going to expect.”
He cocks an eyebrow in her direction. “They asked you about it, didn’t they?”
“It might have come up,” she admits, taking a long sip from her water bottle before setting it aside.
“And what did you say?” he asks, leaning harder into the kitchen counter, hoping the pain of the sharp edge into his lower back will tamp down his need to just agree to her suggestion, no more questions asked.
“I said that I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Yeah, there’s no way they let you get away with that. At the very least Frankie had something to say and probably Chloe too.”
“You’re right. I literally had to flee. And then I thought getting a ride from Izzy was a good idea.”
“And it wasn’t?”
“Nuhuh. I’m not drunk enough to tell you about that.”
“But you are drunk enough to want to kiss me?”
“That’s . . . no, that’s not . . . I’m not drunk,” he raises a challenging eyebrow, “anymore. I was pleasantly inebriated, but it’s almost all gone now.”
“Did you know your vocabulary gets more sophisticated when you’ve been drinking?”
“Does it?”
“Mmhmm. You know, boss, if you want to kiss me, you can just say so. You don’t need to make up an excuse.”
Her eyebrows lift in surprise. “So it’s not over the line for you?”
“Nah, I think we’d still be on the right side of it.”
“It’s just a kiss,” she says, mostly to herself, he thinks. “It shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it is. Because everyone else thinks that we’ve exchanged hundreds, maybe thousands, of kisses already. It could be like practice.”
“Practice kissing? Pissing? No, that doesn’t work,” he says, wrinkling his nose.
She laughs at that and yeah, who cares why she wants to kiss him? He’s down for it. She takes another long sip from her water bottle, finishing the thing off, and she slides down off the counter to dump it into the recycling bin. She’s closer now, but still too far away for his liking.
“Yeah,” she agrees, “like if we ever have to do it in front of other people, we wouldn’t want it to be the first time. Don’t take this the wrong way, but there are so many ways that could go wrong.”
“How would I take that the wrong way?”
“I mean, I could be implying that you’d be bad at it.”
“I’m not and you’re definitely not.” There is absolutely no way she’s not talented as all hell with her mouth. Those full lips and a tongue as clever as hers? Not a chance she doesn’t kiss like a devil.
“You know I’m a good kisser?”
“Call it an instinct.”
“Pshh, you don’t have any data to prove it either way.
I might have to call Miranda and tell her to cancel your defense.
Clearly you haven’t learned a damn thing and you should probably start the program over again from scratch.
Back to Foundations of Information Science for you – maybe this time you’ll do better than a B+. ”
He chuckles low and deep in his chest. “Oh, I plan on collecting some data.”
“Yeah?”
“Absolutely.” He steps closer, looking deeply into her eyes, making sure she’s aware of his every intention. “You’re sure this is what you want?”
“Yes,” she whispers, her mouth gently falling open. His gaze drops down to watch as her tongue darts out against her bottom lip.
Fuck it. Enough.
His arms snake around her waist, pulling her into his chest. She tenses for a second, but then almost immediately relaxes into him.
Burying his face into her neck, he inhales deeply, the scent of her perfume still clinging to her skin as he brushes a kiss at her pulse point, making her shiver against him, their bodies colliding gently, nearly ripping a groan out of his throat.
Her hands come up to brace themselves on his forearms, raising goosebumps everywhere her fingertips brush.
He wants to say something as he pulls back, but he has no idea what, no quick quip to put up against the way she’s looking up at him, eyes alight with a fire he apparently set. So he just lifts his hand up to cup her cheek, his thumb gentle against her lower lip.
She presses a small kiss to the pad of his thumb and he lets out a soft groan, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t lean in. He just waits.
He waits for her.
Because this is her call.
It’s always been her call.