Don’t even get him started on sex, because even the bad sex he’d had in his time was stillgood.
“Fine.” Irina stood and stomped in his direction. “Kiss me. Then we can finish eating. Then I can go to bed.”
He studied her. Was she serious?
She was serious.
Since she was serious, apparently, she’d never had someone kiss her like he meant it. Which was bananas, because she was a gorgeous woman with a fantastic personality and a pair of lips he wasn’t ashamed to have fantasized about occasionally. Not in a skeevy way, just the way a guy notices a woman has kissable lips. Like he noticed she had good hair and a pretty smile.
“Are we gonna do this?” she asked, and was that a little wobble in her voice? Dare he say she was nervous? Probably because she was about to get her very first breath-stealing kiss, courtesy of him.
So, yeah, yes, uh-huh, they were doing this.
He nodded, and ran his tongue over his top lip, deciding the best way to go about giving Irina her first real kiss. He’d give her the kind of kiss that would make her toes curl and her heels kick.
Unless.
He scowled the moment it hit him—he was being fucked with.
Ah, hell, she had to be screwing with him. He pinched his lips together like he’d sucked on a lemon-lime sour candy.
“The faces you are making are not encouraging.” She said this with her usual spunk, but there was still that undercurrent of nervous energy coming from her.
The two of them hadn’t spent an enormous amount of time together, but they had spent a good chunk. During the last Dimefront mini tour, she’d ended up on the bus with him, Tanner, and Mach. The four of them watched birth videos, drank beer, and bonded.
Irina was a first-rate actress, but he’d been around her enough to see any cracks in her facade. Right now? Not one crack.
Damn him to hell, she was fucking serious with this bullshit and not screwing with him.
Which meant…he was on.
Stopping about a foot away from him, she raised her eyebrows and made her eyes big in awellmotion. She gave a good show, but the way the pulse in her neck thrummed a quick beat gave her away.
Oh, yes, they were going to do this.
Except what the hell was in her hair?
“You’ve got a little…” He gestured to his own hairline.
“Yeah, it’s glue.” She brushed at it. “From costuming.”
He could work with a little glue, he’d done way kinkier than that.
Setting his fork down beside his plate with intention, he lined it up with the side of the table, took a small swallow of water, and reached for his chocolate bar. With an ease he wasn’t particularly feeling, he kept eye contact with her as he cracked open the seal and removed a small square of candy.
Irina said nothing as he did all of this, but she continued watching his motions as he moved. Today her eyes were a slate gray with little blue flecks. Of all the eye colors she wore, this might be his favorite.
He stood, pushed his chair in, and held the edge of the chocolate to her mouth. Quizzical, she parted her lips only enough for him to slip the candy there, the pads of his fingertips brushing against the smooth skin. A little zing of attraction caught him slightly off guard. Her pulse beat quicker, too, and their bodies pulled together by some unseen magnetic force.
Not the time to think about that.
She let the candy settle against her tongue, and his palm found the way to her neck, tilting it so her face slanted up.
The air between them crackled with chemistry as he studied her slate eyes with the little blue flecks around the edges, and the dilated pupils.
Oh yeah. He let the chocolate mix with the scent of her, but he didn’t kiss her right away.
That would be expected, and Irina needed a dose of the unexpected to understand this wasn’t mechanical at all.
