He was still holding my face with one hand. The other slid up my flank, his long fingers traversing my bare skin until it was splayed on my chest, absorbing the impact of my thundering heartbeat. It would’ve been so easy to slip my tongue into his mouth, easing it past his smoky lips to tangle with his. I was already half naked. His clothes wouldn’t last long if I wanted them gone, and my bedroom was four strides away.
But despite the blood-pumping wave of desire that swept over me, I did nothing but grip his neck so I felt his pulse battering my fingertips. I didn’t squeeze, I just held him there, reeling from the sorcery of his beautiful kiss, until he pulled back, a shiver passing through him and into me. “I have to go.”
I nodded.
Cam laid his forehead against mine and gazed at me. “I don’t want to.”
“I would not stop you if you wanted to stay.”
“I know.”
Did he?How? Those words had fallen from me unchecked. How did he know them to be true before I did?
I let my hand fall from his throat.
He stood and hovered, uncertainty creasing his chiselled face. “I came here for something else.”
“For sex?”
“No.”
“For business?”
“No.”
I turned my back on his accounts and beckoned him closer. The T-shirt beneath his jacket had ridden up. I tugged it down and smoothed the fabric. “Perhaps it does not matter what you came here for. You will leave with more, no?”
Cam hummed. I thought he might kiss me again, and he did, but on my cheek, a light, heady brush of his lips over the bone.
Then he stepped away and I didn’t get up to see him out.
He was at the kitchen door when I called his name.
“You asked me something,” I said as he shot me a quizzical stare. “In your office this morning.”
The moonlight streaming through the window made his eyes glimmer. “I did.”
“If we are to be friends, I suppose I should answer you.”
“It’s not a condition, mate. We are what we are.”
I knew that, and it made what I was about to do easier. My breath flowed through my lungs as if I wasn’t a man shackled in knots and chains. “My name is Alexei. You can call me that anytime you like, except when we’re fucking.”
“When?”
A small smile played on my lips and his both. I turned back to his accounts, unable to look at him much longer and stay in my seat. “Yes, Cam.When. Now go home and get some sleep. I do not like it when my friends are too tired to play.”
8
Cam
Alexei. The name rolled around my mind, a whisper, an echo that haunted me every minute my attention wasn’t caught up with something else. Granted, I was busy, but I still couldn’t get it—gethim—off my mind.
Alexei. It could’ve been another lie, but it wasn’t. I knew it like I knew the kiss we’d shared would be etched on my soul until he did something else to turn my existence upside down. I mean, shit. Who kissed like that? With their whole body while barely moving a muscle? I didn’t get it. I’d felt himeverywherefrom that simple touch of our lips and I didn’t fuckingget it.
This bloke was a damn warlock. There was no other plausible explanation for the spell he’d cast on me. And that was without the fact that he seemed to have done a U-turn on the possibility of us fucking—
“Pres?”
