“No?”
His attention drops briefly to my mouth, then lifts again. “Not yet.”
My breath catches just enough that he notices. And because I’m not stupid, I take a sip of champagne I do not need. “That was smooth.”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“It was to me.”
I laugh despite myself, and he leans back as if he’s pleased to have gotten it out of me.
God. There is something seriously wrong with how much I like this.
“Your turn,” he says. “Honesty, remember?”
I shift in my seat to face him, still smiling. “Fine. If I were flirting with you, I’d tell you that your face is a public safety issue and your confidence is hanging on by a thread from becoming completely insufferable.”
His laugh is immediate, rich enough to hit me low in the stomach. “And yet,” he replies, “you’d still be flirting with me.”
I let my gaze drift over him in a way that is absolutely deliberate now. “Maybe.”
He goes still for half a beat, and the look he gives me in return is hot enough to make my seat feel smaller.
“Champagne’s good,” I say.
His mouth kicks up into a smirk. “That’s your escape plan?”
“It’s working so far.”
“Not really.”
I glance at him. “You seem very sure of yourself.”
He leans closer. “Adelaide, if I wanted to use a line on you, you’d know.”
That lands somewhere deep and dangerous. I hold his gaze and pray my face isn’t giving away the fact that my entire body just lit up like a badly supervised electrical system.
Then I take another sip of champagne as though I’m a woman fully in control of her life.
I’m not.
His confidence should be too much. It should tip over into arrogance and put me off entirely. Instead, it lands somewhere much deadlier, because it doesn’t feel performative. He isn’t trying to impress me. He just… expects me to keep up.
And evidently I want to.
His arm shifts on the shared armrest, close enough now that the heat radiating off him coats me, igniting a warm ache low in my belly. A tiny involuntary tightening of my thighs, and I cross my legs and hope it looks casual.
His eyes flick down.
I want to die.
He offers me another candy from his bag. I take one because refusing now would feel like weakness, and I am already losing enough ground as it is. “You really think sugar is going to save you.”
“I don’t need saving.”
I pop it into my mouth, then instantly regret doing that under his watchful gaze because now I’m hyperaware of the movementof my lips, my tongue, the ridiculous intimacy of eating caramel in front of a man who looks like that.
