“This is a bad idea.”
“I know.”
“You work for me.”
“I’m very aware.”
His hands tighten fractionally against my neck. “If we do this, everything changes.”
“Everything’s already changed,” I whisper. “It changed the second I put my hands on your chest.”
He’s so close now I can count his eyelashes. More importantly, I see the moment he decides to let go.
He nods again, just barely.
“Fuck it,” he growls.
Then he kisses me.
24
ELIANA
proof·ing: /'proofiNG/: verb
1: allowing dough to rise slowly in a warm environment.
2: when your emotionally constipated boss accidentally creates the perfect conditions for you to catch feelings, then acts surprised when you do exactly that.
My first-ever kiss was with a boy named Ricky Bowen, behind the bleachers in seventh grade gym class. He kissed with a little too much tongue and a hell of a lot too much Axe body spray, then told me to tell my friend Cassie that he thought she was cute. He ran off and I never talked to him again.
Cliché of clichés, I know.
This one is a cliché, too.
But in a very different kind of way.
This kiss with Bastian is a cliché first and foremost in the sense that it absolutely should not be happening, and that’s precisely why I want it never to end.
He’s my boss. He’s an asshole. He’s a megalomaniacal control freak with a shady past and a ladies’ man reputation. He’s too good-looking for me to believe that he’s going to do anything but kiss me and run off and never talk to me again.
However, unlike Ricky Bowen, Bastian kisses with exactly the right amount of tongue and exactly the right amount of body spray, which is fortunately not made by Axe.
He smells like wintergreen gum and his tongue parts my lips gently but firmly, like he doesn’t want to be aggressive but he has no intention of sticking around to see if I change my mind about this.
His hand is still cupping the back of my neck. It’s as huge as ever, and just as warm. All of him is just as warm, actually. In the confines of this cramped, blacked-out elevator stuck halfway between heaven and hell, that heat feels like it’s been cranked up to a blazing inferno.
I’m sweating and delirious as he drags me onto his lap. The hand that’s not on my neck has found its way to my hip. The motion of our tangled limbs was just enough to pull my torn blouse out of its neat French tuck, so there’s a sliver of skin at my waist there for Bastian’s free hand to caress.
His lips are softer than I would’ve guessed for a guy who only ever says rude things. I’d have thought a mouth like his would feel rough and jagged. Maybe fanged, if I’m onto something with the vampire accusations.
But it’s not. It’s soft and velvety, and yet still solid, a contradiction that makes no sense but is true anyway. The broad plane of his chest feels like it goes on forever as he tugs me closer to him. The hard peaks of my nipples stab through the sheerfabric of my blouse and my flimsy, decade-old bra. If he’s not careful, he’ll lose an eye to them.
Heiscareful, though. His hand cupping the back of my head is careful and the flicker of his tongue warring with mine, a tease of press-and-retreat, press-and-retreat—that’s careful, too.
He’ssocareful andsotender that I don’t know whether to cry, or to rip away and tell him that I’m not made of sugar and spice and everything nice, and that if he wanted to get a little bit rougher with it, well, he won’t catch me complaining.
When he tilts his head to change the angle and deepen the kiss, the stubble of his beard rakes over my cheek. Something about that feeling, his roughness against my softness, is so masculine and erotic that a huge shiver rips through me out of nowhere, almost like an orgasm in its heat and intensity. It surges down to my toes, rebounds from there back up, and escapes from my mouth through the tiny space left for breathing in the form of a moan.
