“Tell me to leave and to never come near you again,” I beg. “Tell me because I can’t keep watching you run to him while I’m staring at my phone waiting for you to message me.”
He looks at my mouth. He doesn’t mean to. He does. His voice drops. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t get you out of my head. Because I know I shouldn’t want you, but every time I’m near you, there’s fire in my blood. You’re a craving I can’t satisfy.” He looks away from me, a slight blush on his cheeks. “I can’t...I can’t get you out of my head.”
It’s not a declaration; it’s a sick, relief-colored confession. I feel it like a hand on the back of my neck.
“Say it again,” I murmur.
He shakes his head. “Don’t get greedy.”
“Too late.” My smile is a cut.
His laugh is helpless and short. He takes one step in, and then there is no step left but the one that ends the distance.
“Magnus,” he says, warning and welcome at once.
“Alaric,” I answer, and the way his name sits in my mouth is ruin.
For a beat we just look. The room narrows. The music slows.
He closes the gap.
The kiss is the opposite of careful. It’s not obscene. It’s not anything I couldn’t do on a city street in daylight. It’s just… not gentle. It’s the kind of kiss that saysI’ve been pretending, and I’m tired of the lie.His hand finds the front of my shirt, bunches the fabric like he needs to anchor himself to something that isn’t money or duty or the long vowel of his last name.
I kiss him like I’m signing my name across every polished surface in this place.
There’s a sound in his throat, low and throttled back, like he caught it and forgot to swallow it before it escaped. I feel him debate with himself against my mouth: Pull away and retain the high ground or stay and admit the slope we’re on is slippery and he wants the slide.
He stays.
He stares at my mouth. Catches himself. Fails to. “This is insane.”
“Probably,” I agree. “So make it practical. Let me drive you home when you’re done faking this.”
He laughs once, harsh. “And tell Kyle what? ‘Thanks for the champagne, I’m leaving with the enemy?’”
“Tell him you don’t feel well,” I say. “It won’t even be a lie.”
He runs a hand through immaculate hair, ruining it by two degrees. I feel that ruin in my knees. “You don’t get to ask me for this.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m asking anyway.”
His eyes search my face like there’s an answer hidden there. Then his shoulders drop. “Ten minutes,” he says. “Wait by the east valet.”
I step back so he can breathe. “Ten minutes,” I echo.
He stops me with a glance at the mirror. “Magnus?—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t make a scene,” he says, like he knows exactly who I am and still decided to try this.
“I won’t,” I say, and for once I mean it.
I leave by the service hallway, pulse hammering, a laugh caught in my throat like a prayer. Ten minutes. I can do ten minutes.
