I walk over and go into my closet, pulling a pair of shorts off the shelf. I refuse to have this conversation with Ryder in my underwear. I pull them on before walking back into the room, getting comfortable on the bed, and leaning against my headboard. “I like him, Ryder,” I tell him, even though it’s more than that. I can’t tell him I love Leo, or he will continue to accuse me of going easy on him. Honestly, I probably am. Anyone else would have been more than dead by now, but here he is, still alive and still in my house.
“Why? He just screams fragile as fuck.”
I roll my eyes. “He doesn’t.”
“Why him? He’s been lying to you for months, Les.” Ryder slides onto the bed beside me, kicking his boots off.
“I’m well fucking aware of that, Ryder.”
“I’m not saying it to rub salt in the wound,” he sighs. “You could have any man you want.”
I snort. “Who?”
“You’re so dense sometimes,” he says with a chuckle, but it sounds off. “All I’m saying is you don’t need him.”
One second, I’m looking at Ryder with a glare for calling me dense, and the next, his lips are sealing over mine. He uses my surprise to his advantage, pushing his tongue into my mouth. I place my hands on his chest to push him away but end up yanking him closer with fists in his shirt. The first touch of his lips is like electricity running through my body. He hooks an arm around my waist, pulling us both to a laying position on the bed, his body half over mine. I run my hands up his chest and around his neck, running my hands through his hair, pulling him closer. His mouth is magic against mine, pulling me into his kiss. Stroking my tongue with his, he braces a hand on the back of my head, holding me against his mouth just as hard as I’m holding him to mine. He shifts his body, settling between my thighs, rubbing his hard cock against my shortscovered pussy. He groans into my mouth when I push my hips up to meet his, and it’s like a bucket of ice-cold water being dumped over my head. I finally gather myself and shove at his chest. He releases my mouth immediately and rolls over to the other side of the bed, staring at the ceiling.
I touch my lips, wondering what the hell just happened. This isRyder.My best friend of twenty-five years. Hell, our birthdays are a month apart, his in February, mine in March. We never crossed that line. Until now.
“You can’t tell me you didn’t feel that,” he says.
I shake my head in denial because I did feel that, but I also feel guilty. I just told Leo I loved him, and he’s lying in the room below us while I’m making out with someone else.
“We can’t, Ryder,” I whisper.
“Because of him?” he retorts.
“Because I won’t ruin our friendship.”
He jumps off the bed, scooping his boots out of the floor. “One of these days, you will open those pretty blue eyes to the truth.” He strides out of the room, leaving me to figure out his cryptic remark.
The truth? What truth? With that rolling through my head, I jerk my shorts off, slide my bra off through my shirt, slinging it across the room. I settle into bed, and all I can smell is Ryder, his cologne, and that woodsy scent that follows him around.Ugh!Why the hell did he have to kiss me? What the hell even was that?
I punch the pillow, trying to get comfortable.I can still feel how his lips move over mine, and how his body felt pressed against me.
“Oh my god,” I groan into the pillow, not wanting to admit how much that little bit of contact made me want more.
When I finally fall asleep, it’s full of dreams of Ryder and Leo.
“You look like shit,”Gage remarks from the passenger side of my BMW.
“Fuck off,” I grumble.
I woke up in a shitty mood because of Ryder kissing me, and I didn’t sleep for crap. We won’t even talk about the dreams that would wake me from a dead sleep, moaning. I took care of myself twice throughout the night because of those damn dreams. Each time I woke up, I almost found one of them to take care of it for me. I made it to the door once ready to find Ryder and demand he finish what he started. Luckily, I talked myself out of it before I went to find him. Now it’s eight in the morning, on a Monday at that. It’s mid-June here, and it is too hot for this shit. Fucking hell, my mood is turning dark, fast.
We are on our way to one of our clubs, Club Maximus, to do some administrative work. I hate every second of it, but it’s how these places run as well as they do. It’s one of the biggest clubs I own. It’s in an old warehouse, so we have a lot of space for two bars, two dance floors, lots of seating, a DJ, and my newest addition soon is going to be dancers. People line up for miles to get in any day of the week.
He chuckles. “What’s your problem?”
“Ryder. Ryder is my fucking problem,” I snap and then take a deep breath. It wasn’t Gage’s fault. “He’s an asshole.”
“I thought he came up to apologize last night,” he says with a frown over his mirrored sunglasses.
“He apologized, all right,” I reply.With his tongue down my throat.
“Okay,” Gage says slowly. “Then what’s wrong?”
I whip into the club’s back parking lot and push my oversized sunglasses up on my head, shoving the car into park. “He kissed me.”
