Chapter Twelve
I wrench my hands from Lewis’s shirt like it’s on fire, as awareness of what just happened singes through my veins.
“I—”
“We should probably—” Lewis says at the same time and drags a heavy hand through his hair.
The collar of his button-down is crumpled, and my fingers tingle with the memory of messing it up.
I shove them into my hair and scrape my curls into a bun so tight that my brain gets forced out of its dazed, horny state, then remind myself that this kiss was in preparation for tonight.
So he can focus on reconnecting with his brother.
“Okay, so the data…” I try to revert back to scientific language while I tell my reward centers to stop demanding more, more, more, but my voice sounds breathless.
Lewis’s brows flick up as he echoes, “The data?”
“Yes, the data. The kiss.” I clear my throat. “We hypothesized that, uh, some physical intimacy would make this relationship seem real.” I can’t tell who of us I’m reminding. With his lips against mine and his hands on my thighs, the kiss felt dangerously close to the real thing.
Real desire.
Which it can’t be, because we’re only doing this for a specific purpose: protecting my academic integrity, and helping Lewis reconnect with his family. Everything else is secondary, so I need to get over how my body still hums with his proximity.
I try to get off the table, but while Lewis has pulled back, he hasn’t left the place between my open legs, which makes me slide down his body until I’m eye-level with his mouth.
“Fuck, Frances,” Lewis growls, stopping me with a palm on my hip, inadvertently trapping me between him and the table. His hardness against my abdomen leaves no doubt that he must’ve been into this kiss, too.
All my blood collects in my cheeks. I didn’t think this through.
“Could you, please…” My hand trembles as I motion for him to move out of the way.
“Oh.” He glances down at the sliver of space between us.
With his head tipped forward, I get a whiff of his hair and a front row view of the blond strands.
It’s not helping. “Right.” But our lanyards are tangled up in each other, keeping us chained together.
Knuckles brush as we hastily work ourselves free.
When he finally steps back, his hip catches against a chair and topples it over.
Desperate to put some distance between us, I rush to the opposite side of the table where my laptop is propped open. Lewis picks up the chair, then meets my eyes with a sheepish expression, one corner of his mouth tucked up. “I—I think we should talk about this.”
A sticky, uneasy feeling prickles over my skin.
Talk?
Absolutely not. We don’t need to. Nothing’s amiss, because this kiss was meant to make us more convincing as a couple. The way it set me alight doesn’t mean anything. It cannot. We’re colleagues, and those are better off not fooling around, not kissing, and, most especially, not dating.
I force a smile. “No need to talk. We agreed it was practice, right?”
One kiss is hardly enough practice, my lizard brain supplies as my eyes get caught on Lewis’s lips, still swollen from being pressed against mine.
I need to get out of here before I find an excuse to kiss him again.
Shoving my laptop into my bag, I yank it over my shoulder.
As I reach for my water bottle, it tips over and rolls toward the edge, but Lewis catches it before it falls.
I debate whether I really need my bottle back or if I can leave it behind and get a new one, when Lewis holds it out.
“Here,” he says, and I’m not sure if I’m imagining the resignation in his voice. “Text me your address, okay? I’ll pick you up later.”
The afternoon rushes by in a flurry of getting ready for the graduation party tonight, all while downplaying to myself just how horny that kiss made me.
I’m angry and annoyed that after years of having meaningless flings, it’s not a random friend of a friend who made me feel this way but Lewis, who is decidedly off-limits as a colleague.
I’m also scared he’ll want to talk about the kiss when I see him again, no doubt to tell me what a big mistake it was.
But it turns out that in light of the upcoming reunion with his family, he isn’t very interested in talking anymore.
He’s quiet when he picks me up, a stoic figure poured into a three-piece suit that’s such a deep blue it brings out the color of his eyes.
For a moment, at the door, his gaze drifts down my face and snags on the halter neckline of my dress.
The lilac chiffon fabric hugs my body close and exposes my back.
But then his expression closes up again and he stays quiet for the entire taxi ride downtown, pulling on his cuff links with his thumbs and radiating nervous energy.
“Here we go,” are the first words he utters, after paying for the taxi and guiding me down the pavement to Pier 11.
Before us lies a yacht that’s as big as the ferries leaving to Brooklyn or Staten Island from the neighboring piers.
People wearing tailcoats and evening gowns spill out of the two-story cabin onto the deck, while the tasteful soundtrack of a jazz band sweetens our wait.
The tinkle of a piano, the croon of a saxophone, the excited chatter of the party guests.
Our names are checked, and then we’re walking up the short gangway.
It bobs with the sway of the waves, and I wobble in my strappy high heels until Lewis grabs my arm.
Inside, a seamless window front encloses the salon on the lower deck, revealing a view of the soaring skyscrapers to one side and the majestic Brooklyn Bridge on the other.
Beyond the opulent setting, wealth is apparent in the shine of people’s hair and their smooth complexions, the sleek ties and glistening necklaces.
“Is this your family’s? Why didn’t you tell me they owned a freaking yacht?” I call over my shoulder, the air a cool relief from the heat outside. “They do own this thing, right? Are you sure you don’t want anything to do with them anymore?”
When I turn around, I catch Lewis’s gaze snap from my back to his wrists. The shells of his ears have turned pink and he’s nervously fiddling around with his cuff links again.
Before we can make our way farther into the room, I pull Lewis into a nook under the stairs that lead to the top deck.
But despite my heels putting my eyes almost level with his, I’m not strong enough to womanhandle him, so we stumble into the alcove, which is smaller than it looked from afar.
My face gets squished against the smooth skin of Lewis’s neck.
“What the fuck,” Lewis hisses into my temple as he trips over my toes. The alcove’s original inhabitant, a potted palm tree, leaves little space for us.
“Sorry—”
To stop us from falling over, he clamps an arm around my waist. His hand lands on my spine, now exposed by the low dip of my dress.
Warm.
Firm.
I inhale sharply at the sudden contact. The air hitting my lungs is ninety percent log cabin with an afterthought of oxygen. I breathe him in again, once, twice, before I weasel a hand between us and peel myself off his neck.
“Why—”
“It’s not how I’d planned it. But. Here.
” I maneuver him around, shielding us from view by the width of his shoulders.
The wall is a grounding weight at my back, allowing me to recover from the onslaught of feelings his proximity has triggered.
They only feel more intense now, after we kissed.
Practice or not, that kiss in the library was a terrible idea.
Lewis brushes the fanning leaves of the palm tree out of his face. “Christ, what was that for?”
“You seemed nervous,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“Before you shoved me into a wall, I was.”
I narrow my eyes at him, at his face cast in shadows in the dimly lit alcove. “You were not,” I insist. “You started getting all flushed again.”
“Jumping to conclusions, are we?” He studies me and heat blooms wherever I notice his gaze, spreading from my shoulders over my neckline and up my throat. “Maybe it wasn’t nerves. Maybe I was just mesmerized by my pretend girlfriend.”
“Yeah right,” I scoff. “You looked more like you’re already missing the wrinkled shirts and elbow patches of our dear colleagues.”
“That, too.” He gives me a small smile that disappears as soon as he sneaks a glance out of our hiding spot. “This place brings back so many memories.”
I raise my eyebrows. “So, this yacht is like your family’s party boat?”
“I’ve never seen it, so it could be borrowed from a family friend?
But no, I meant the…” He gestures over his shoulder.
“Crowd. The vibe. I left for a reason, and being back is weird. I keep wondering—if this is how my brother celebrates his graduation, do I really want to meet him? It seems more like something my father would do.”
His sigh tugs something loose in me. I know I can’t make this situation with Lewis and his brother right, but I can try my best to support him through it.
“Jumping to conclusions, are we?” I parrot him, imbuing his words with all the gentleness I can muster, lest he take them as an attack.
“Look, unless you want to make a run for it in the next thirty seconds or so, we’re here now.
Maybe give your brother and this whole event a chance? ”
I flatten a crease in his collar and smooth the pad of my thumb over the lines of worry etched into his forehead. Lewis blinks at me, but I’m as surprised as he is at the sudden contact.
If only I hadn’t kissed him, maybe it would be easier to keep my hands to myself.
It’s alright, I tell myself. This has nothing to do with wanting to touch him again. I’m getting into character. Supportive girlfriend, remember?
“Besides, if there’s one thing I learned recently, it’s that people can surprise you,” I continue, “and maybe he can, too.”
When Lewis reaches for my hand, my belly tumbles into a little swoop, even if all he does is tuck my arm into the crook of his elbow. I really need to get a grip, mind over matter and all that stuff, otherwise the next ten days will be an exquisite form of torture for my touch-deprived body.
“As much as it pains me to say this, Dr. Silberstein, I think you may be right. Shall we?”
Leaving the alcove on his arm, I widen my eyes in fake astonishment. “Look at you, agreeing with me for once! Who would’ve thought that he, the man they call Dr. Theodore Lewis North, the one who’s always right, was capable of uttering those words.”
He lets out an exasperated sigh as he tugs me closer. “Jesus, maybe I do want to make a run for it.”