Like Oliver, her ex-boyfriend. He’d been an early-morning runner. He’d also been a late-night cheater, but that was a conversation for another day.
“Are you one of them?”
“What? No.” Bo shook her head. “I choose sanity and sleep over early-morning workouts. Do you know how grumpy I get without sleep?”
“I’m starting to find out. But in my defence, you said to wake you,” Max replied, with an infuriating shrug.
“I assumed you would be here around midnight, not 3 a.m. I mean, what sort of people were you playing a private concert for? The classical music appreciation society of a league of vampires? The monthly meeting of the London branch of Insomniacs Anonymous?”
That amused twinkle Bo liked so much was back in Max’s eyes, and he leaned against her doorway, regarding her with interest.
“Actually, it was a birthday party for the ninety-year-old father of the Prime Minister.”
Bo gave him a look. “Come on, Max.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Oh, I believe the part about the Prime Minister. I don’t believe a ninety-year-old man stayed up till 3 a.m. My older sister is in her forties and goes to bed at 9 p.m. I’m twenty-six and out by ten.”
Max gave a half-smile. “All right. I admit that the birthday boy was asleep by the second movement. There were some important people there however, and they all wanted to hear meplay and then talk to me about the piano lessons they took a million years ago.”
“Till three in the morning?” Bo asked sceptically.
“Till two in the morning,” Max told her. “I then came home and got changed. I didn’t think you’d appreciate the black dinner jacket and dress shirt I wear when I perform.”
Bo looked at the garish purple shirt and beige shorts again and realized Max had put them onwillingly. Who even was this man?
“Maybe I would,” she told him, crossing her arms over her chest. “I hate that shirt you’re wearing. It hurts my eyes. My tired, sleep-deprived eyes.”
“Oh.” Max looked down at his attire, as though seeing the purple shirt for the first time. Without even pausing for breath, he wrenched the offending shirt over his head, throwing it to Bo’s floor. “Since you hate it so much, you can keep it,” he told her, not without a small degree of smugness when her eyes immediately fell upon his naked chest.
“Keep it? You mean burn it.”
“If that’s what lights your fire, sweetheart, then go for it,” Max replied easily, leaning towards her. He reached out with one hand, hooking a finger under the strap of her chemise and pulling her closer to him. His skin on hers was like a fresh heap of coals being thrown on a long-simmering fire, and Bo inhaled sharply.
“I don’t like the shorts either,” she whispered, and something passed in the air between them, hot and electric. Releasing her chemise, Max stepped past the door, closing it behind him and locking it. There was a familiar look in his eyes; one Bo was beginning to know all too well.
“Really? You better take them off then.”
Bo’s heart began to race a little and her skin prickled with sudden awareness at how close Max was standing to her.
“Do your own dirty work,” she retorted, but there was no real bite to her words. It was all play-acting; the best acting she’d ever done, anyway. Not that it was the time to reflect once again on her failed career. Not when Max was looking at her likethatand she was feeling likethis.
“You’re the one who doesn’t like them,” Max reminded her, leaning against her wall now. “So, this is your dirty work.”
“Max—” she began, fully intending to continue the charade of their bickering for a few moments longer, but Max stopped her unexpectedly. Without warning, he lifted her up around his waist, kissing her hard on the mouth, his tongue against hers swallowing any arguments she might have had left.
Two things occurred to Bo in that moment. The first was that Max was far stronger than he looked, which was odd because he wasn’t the jacked, gym-addict type she normally went for. She’d dated Oliver for nearly eight months, and in that time, he’d spent more time going down on a squat rack than he ever had on her. Max’s body was entirely different to his, with less-defined muscles and a softness to his physique that Bo appreciated. He was still strong though. Max lifted her with practiced ease, one hand on her waist and the other cupping her cheek, kissing her in a way that was both messy and gracelessly perfect.
Bo’s second thought, one which soon eclipsed the first as Max’s kiss deepened, was that both she and he were far too dressed for what was about to go down. He was hard, a promising bulge prodding her thigh, and she ground against it impatiently, eliciting the most delicious sounds from Max’s mouth.
“Take them off,” she urged again, wriggling against Max, but he caught her mouth once more, shaking his head even as he kissed her.
“No.”
His hand moved from her cheek to her hair, and he tugged lightly on the ponytail she’d tied hours earlier. The pull on her scalp went directly to her core, and she felt a flair of lust.
Hair-pulling. Huh.Bo realized with a start that she was kind of into it. It shouldn’t have felt good, shouldn’t have felt so intensely personal, but it did, and she added it to her list of things to research on Redditlater. Maybe it was primal, some kind of evolutionary throwback to when humans had more fur to run hands through. Maybe it was just her, and something she got a kick out of. Or maybe, thought Bo without any real surprise, it was because it was Max’s hands on her head and Max’s fingers in her hair and that was what she really enjoyed: Max.
