I lifted my chin.
Fucker.
“Yes. I’ll be fine with it.” I’d just curse him every time I walked out of the room.
“If you’re distracted while teaching and caring for my daughter, you’re not giving her your best. I expect it.”
“Oh, well, then. Good. Because I’m fine.”
He pushed his chest into me, and his hand came to my neck to feel me taking a gulp at our proximity. “The blush on your cheeks, the biting of that lip, and your rapid breathing say you’re not.”
“You’re fucking delusional.”
“A filthy mouth too. I guess you got a little devil in the darling then, huh? I’d say I like the Devilish Darling, but I don’t like you lying and it’s what you’re doing now. You know I’m not delusional.” He dragged a finger across my jaw and then down my neck to my collarbone. He watched how I swallowed and shivered against his touch, so soft and yet so in control that it couldn’t be ignored.
“Your ego is huge if you think you’re affecting me, Mr. Knight. This is unprofessional.”
“Actually, it’s the most professional thing I can think to do. That way, you don’t keep thinking about what it’d feel like to have my lips on you, and I’m not thinking of you spreading your legs for me twenty-four seven.”
“I don’t think about that.”
“DarlingMia.” He said my name as a chastisement. “I saw the way you looked at my mouth.”
“How?” I whispered.
His eyes dropped to my lips, where his gaze practically burned my flesh, searing into my body and straight to my core. Suddenly, his cold stare melted away and he held nothing back. I felt his hunger and unrelenting need in the air.
I fell into it and couldn’t climb out. Down, down, down I went. I wondered what it would be like for him to take me after looking at me like that, what his lips would feel like, if his touch would be rough or soft.
When he leaned in a centimeter, I grabbed his shirt and murmured, “Jameson.”
He didn’t come closer, even as I pulled him toward me and slid to the side of the sink so I could lean against the steel counter behind me. His jaw flexed as he let out a low growl. “I might enjoy my name on your lips likethata bit too much, Mia,” he said, his gaze snapping back up to mine. The hunger was gone, almost like I’d imagined it. “Anyway, now you understand.”
“Understand?”
“How it feels when you look at me.”
“You’re kidding?” I practically seethed, but then his hand was at my hip, fingers sliding into the waistband of my skirt.
“You want me like I want you.” He wasn’t asking. Just stating a fact. “If not, tell me to stop before I touch you.”
My skin lit up, ignited from his calloused hands digging into that sensitive spot at my inner hip, at his thumb swiping down lower toward my core. He did it slowly. I could have grabbed him, I could have shifted away, but instead I held the edge of the counter behind me, my body practically begging for him to go further. “You don’t want this. I’m your daughter’s teacher.”
It was all I could get out. I didn’t saystop, and he knew it. He leaned in, breathed in my scent at the base of my neck. “I’ve wanted this since the first day I saw you. Pretty dark hairblowing in the wind, your voice as sweet as a melody when my daughter ran up to you. Now, you’re in my house and it’s all I think about … how you’ll sound when you moan for me. I don’t practice resistance because it breeds longing and weakness. I’d rather find out how you taste and indulge in the fantasy so I don’t have it again. Wouldn’t you?”
That brought me back to what he truly was. Meticulous. Calculated. Cold Jameson Knight. He wanted resolution to his feelings—he wanted to get rid of them.
“If that helps you draw a professional line, Mr. Knight.” I lifted my chin, because if he was drawing a line, so was I. He wanted to get me out of his system, well, I wasn’t going to even let him in mine.
“‘Mr. Knight’ again, huh?” His smile was slow and vicious. “I guess it’s imperative that I prove it to you.”
“Prove it?”
“Prove how you’re going to be soaked for me and dripping from this counter, begging for me to fuck you.”
I was so worked up I just blurted out the truth. “That’s nearly impossible. No man has ever made me want to beg. Quite frankly, I don’t even get that wet for myself.”
“Yourself?” He searched my eyes for more information, and I immediately regretted what I’d said.
