“Your turn,” I said roughly, stepping out of the way.
Rowe regarded me with a slight smile from where he’d been resting on the bed. “I don’t need to go.”
I squinted at him. “They why the fuck did you follow me?”
Rowe shrugged. “You looked like you needed the company. Anyway, shouldn’t I follow my boyfriend back to our room?”
I almost wanted to growl at him. Boyfriend? What fucking boyfriend? He didn’t have to take things this far.
But I was glad, in a way. Because getting mad at him gave me the chance to flip my tears into something different.
Spite.
I was good at spite.
“You’re really taking this acting seriously, aren’t you?” I asked, setting a trap for him. Either he didn’t clock the sneer on my face or it didn’t bother him. He stood up casually, arranging himself ready to leave.
“Of course,” he said. “I want to do it right for you. We have to convince them, don’t we?”
“Well, there’s one thing that you’re not doing great on,” I said, squaring up to him. I had to look up at him with his greater height, but so what? The same was true of most guys I met. I wasn’t intimidated by him.
A flash of concern traveled across his face, to my satisfaction. “Really? What?”
“When you kissed me before, it wasn’t convincing enough,” I told him. I lifted my chin, stared him right in the face. “It felt like you were holding back. No one’s going to believe that. Ace looked at me right after and I could see he saw right through you.”
“I’m… sorry about that,” Rowe said. There was a hint of amusement in his voice that only made me more angry. He was supposed to be taking this seriously. He’d even said he was. Now he was mocking me? “Next time, I’ll try harder to make it look real.”
“It’s going to happen again,” I told him. “Just saying that isn’t good enough. We need to practice.”
“You want me to kiss you like it’s for real?” Rowe asked. He tilted his head towards me slightly. His eyebrows were raised and there was the hint of a smile on his face, like this was all a big fucking joke. “Right now?”
“I want you to do the job I hired you for,” I bristled at him. “So, yes. You’d better do it now.”
Rowe looked down at my mouth and back up at my eyes, and my own mouth went dry, and then he was leaning down towards me.
His lips met mine with so much force that I found myself reaching out and grabbing onto the front of his suit jacket, not wanting to fall back. I heard a clunk as his cane dropped, hitting the bed and then the floor, disregarded. He brought both of his hands up to the back of my neck, brushing through my short-cropped hair and raising the hairs all along my spine.
The crush of Rowe’s mouth against mine became more desperate, more heated. He kissed the air out of my lungs, kissed my bones out of my body, kissed my brain out of my head. His tongue probed my lips and I gasped into his mouth as it slipped past them, finding my own and tangling with it. He twisted his head in search of better angles, a current of electricity running through me everywhere we touched, heat pooling in the bottom of my stomach.
I felt myself lifting up towards him, straining for more, almost floating up to his level. His hands anchored me, kept me stable and safe, even as his kiss deepened and heated even more, in ways I hadn’t thought possible. As he pulled away I was panting for breath, mourning the loss of the warmth of his palms from the back of my neck.
“There,” he said, and I belatedly realized I needed to open my eyes. “How convincing was that?”
I spun around fast so he couldn’t get a chance to see that I was hard. At least we hadn’t been standing close together enough for him to find it out another way. “It was fine,” I muttered. “If that’s the best you can do, I guess it will work.”
I reached for the door and yanked it open, more worried right then about what he thought of me than about the possibility of running into someone else in the corridor before I’d calmed down.
There was only one question running through my mind – a question that begged to be answered.
If that was him pretending…
Just how good would a real kiss be?
I nearly walked into someone as I stepped out of the door, the surprise enough to help knock down my arousal to a lower peg at least.
“Oh, sorry,” the man I’d almost collided with said, stopping dead to let me out. He was hot, with agelessly smooth dark skin and black hair twisted into tiny, short braids around his head. He looked up over my head and caught sight of who was behind me. “Oh. Rowe! Hey, man. What are you doing here?”
My heart stopped in my chest.
