“She says yes to things.” She grins. “That’s basically my whole life strategy. Something sounds fun or scary or both, and I say yes.”
“So, you’re a risk-taker.”
“I prefer to think of myself as adventure-positive.” She was smiling as she said it, but now some of the light dims from her bright gaze. She shrugs, glancing away from me. “My ex-boyfriend, Jake? He had a lot of opinions about my approach to life. ‘Exhausting’ was his favorite. ‘Naive’ was a close second. He thought I needed to grow up. Be more realistic.”
She delivers this the way I usually deliver information about my ex, Victoria. Light. Easy. Ancient history. The lighter the delivery, the heavier the cargo. I recognize the technique because I’m an expert in it, and I can see her tells the way I’d see vulnerabilities in a system audit: the shift in her voice on “grow up,” the fingers fidgeting with the hem of her dress, the smile that stops well short of her eyes.
I should say something neutral. I should nod and change the subject and let this conversation stay on the surface where it’s safe and I’m not at risk of saying something I haven’t clearedwith the rational part of my brain that has been losing ground all evening.
I should not be invested in the psychological profile of a man I’ve never met, yet I am fuming over this Jake asshole. What kind of idiot would want to wound someone as inherently good as Ella? Who would want to dim any of her light? I’m pretty sure I don’t want to answer that, because it wasn’t that long ago when I’d been grumbling over the way she’d completely disrupted my flight, my accommodations, and my sleep.
The truth is, she’s disrupting a hell of a lot more than that, but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to give a damn.
“He was wrong, Ella.” She looks at me, a note of surprise in her expression. I should stop here. I should absolutely stop here. “Anyone who finds you exhausting is only telling you they can’t keep up. You’re better off without that kind of person in your life.”
The silence that lands between us has a different weight than any silence we’ve shared before.
“That’s...” She swallows. “That might be the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in a really long time.”
My pulse kicks. In my throat, my sternum, my groin, because she’s looking at me with those wide blue eyes with a tenderness that levels me. I should have kept things light tonight—arm’s length. Instead, I just handed her something I didn’t plan to give and now the air between us is full of electricity and neither of us is reaching for an easy escape.
“I’m not saying it just to be nice. It’s the truth.”
She holds my gaze. The breeze moves her hair and I can feel the warmth coming off her skin from here. She’s closer than she was before. I’m not sure how it happened, but we both seem to have drifted incrementally nearer to each other. Too near, because now all I want to do is close the distance and pull heragainst me. I want to do a hell of a lot more than that, if I’m being honest with myself.
I should step back. I should pick up my drink and get the fuck out of here before I do something stupid. Her gaze is wide and trusting as she looks at me, and whatever she sees in my eyes doesn’t seem to be warning enough to make her move away either.
Every calculation in my head ends with the same conclusion. This is a bad idea. Yet my hand goes to her jaw anyway.
She doesn’t move. Her mouth is slightly parted, those irresistible lips begging me to take them. Her skin is warm, impossibly soft under my thumb. She tilts her face into my hand, one small unconscious gesture of trust that shreds whatever was left of my restraint more thoroughly than the entire evening combined.
Then her mouth is under mine and the taste of her hits my senses like a system crash. Every background process goes dark. She kisses me back instantly, no hesitation, her fist closing in my shirt and pulling me closer. The low hum she makes against my mouth vibrates through my chest and straight down to my cock. I moan with the intensity of how much I want her, and when she answers back with a breathless sigh against my mouth, whatever I thought I could control about this is over.
I set my glass down on the wide railing without looking. She’s got all of my attention and I need both hands free to bring her deeper into my embrace. The soft, full length of her is pressed close enough to feel how hard I am, but she doesn’t pull away. Her nails drag up the back of my neck into my hair and the white-hot current that shoots down my spine nearly takes my knees out.
All my imaginings about how her lips would feel under mine are obliterated by reality. Her kiss is fire. Her tongue slides pastmy lips and teeth and the blood in my veins goes molten. Three more seconds of this and I won’t be able to stop.
I have to stop.
Somewhere, beneath the scorched ruins of my control, I realize that this is a recipe for disaster. We’re not a couple. We’re sharing this romantic suite only because we have to, and pretending there’s anything waiting for us on the other side of our hotel snafu is not being fair to Ella.
Fuck. I pull back on a raw curse, panting. “I can’t do this with you.”
She freezes in my arms. I let go, forcing myself to take a step away from her. Another curse rips out of me, sharper than the first.
She stares at me, confusion swimming in her eyes. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Shit. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. I did.” I frown at her, all of my self-loathing written on my face. “I’m sorry. This was a mistake.”
She searches my face, looking for the man whose hands just pulled her in, who kissed her like he was starving. I don’t let her find him. I lock it down, all of it, and watch her expression shift from dazed to confused to guarded. Seeing some of her light dim—because of me—is like taking a punch to my gut.
Now who’s the asshole?
“I’m sorry, Ella.” My voice is gravel in my throat as I do anything to avoid her wounded stare. “It won’t happen again.”
I pick up my glass and walk inside, closing the sliding door behind me.
The empty suite swallows me. I down the rest of the warm rum, then set the glass on the counter next to her note. My heart rate is still somewhere north of a hundred and twenty. Her taste still on my tongue, her scent still in my lungs, and mycock throbbing against my shorts so insistently I’ll need an hour under a cold shower to get it back under control.
