“You caught me,” I repeat my thought on a broken, panting whisper.
His dark eyes flare. “You were falling.”
I was going to thank him but something else slips out of my mouth. “I didn’t…”
“You didn’t what?” he rasps.
“I didn’t know that your eyes could do that.”
“Do what?”
I study them for a moment. I study their color, the dark flecks, his ever-expanding pupils, the thick, forest-like eyelashes surrounding them.
“Become dark like that. Navy blue. I-I always thought your eyes looked like the summer skies. Like lazy Sunday afternoons and bike rides and…” I trail off when his hold on my body flexes. And I realize something else.
That he’s touching me.
I mean, that’s obvious; he just stopped my fall, but I hadn’t realized that his hands are splayed wide on my torso. And that his fingers are so big and large and so dominating in their presence that when he dips the pads of those fingers into my flesh, I feel it all over.
I feel it so much that I suck in a breath on parted lips.
“You like my eyes, huh?” he murmurs, watching my mouth for a second.
And I can’t help but nod. “Yeah.”
“Summer skies. Sunday afternoons and…” He pauses, a slight frown appearing between his brows. “And what was the last one?”
“Uh, bike rides,” I say automatically.
Something about my answer makes him move his thumb on my belly, and if I wasn’t already holding in my breath, I would swallow it down now.
I would swallow it and destroy it and never breathe again because he’s moving his thumb, circling it. I know it’s only through layers of cloth but I never thought the slight scrape of his digit against my body would be so hypnotizing.
“Bike rides, yeah,” he rasps, nodding. “That’s quite the list.”
“I –”
Those eyes of his become heavy then, hooded, as he replies over me, “I mean, I’m used to my groupies screaming my nameand all the things they want me to do to them but you’re the first groupie to wax poetic about my eyes.”
My spine straightens up at that.
Great.
He’s mocking me again.
“I’m not your groupie.”
“It’s okay. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m just that charming. Girls can’t stop thinking about me.”
“Charming. Yeah, I don’t think you need to worry about that with me. I can definitely resist your supposed charms.”
He ignores me, his lips stretching into a smirk, his thumb drawing circles around my belly button. “What else do you like about me? My cheekbones, perhaps? That seems to have a devastating effect on the female population.”
I tighten my fists around the rung of the ladder. “You know, you’re such a jerk.”
He leans closer, the heels of his palms pressing even further into my body. “Did you also have my wallpaper on your computer? Your phone maybe? Isn’t that what schoolgirls do?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask them?”
