The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance 2016. Кейт Хьюит
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drowsy contentment was fading fast. She knew what he was telling her, but just in case she missed the message he was making sure he spelt it out in words of one syllable. Don’t confuse lust with love. He could give her lust, but love wasn’t on the table, and he was probably horrified at the possibility that he might be stuck with someone who’d fall for him.
He was telling her that his boredom threshold would be reached quickly, and that once that happened they would settle into playing the game they were destined to play, with no nasty surprises along the way.
Like unnecessary emotion.
She knew exactly what she should tell him. That this had been a one-off. One of those curiosity things... Something that she had succumbed to but which she did not want to repeat.
She opened her mouth and he smoothed his hand over her, between her thighs, and her body suddenly had other things in mind.
‘But...’ he said.
‘But what?’ She tried to inject some defiance into her voice but she heard the way she sounded—helpless and breathy.
‘We have options.’
‘What are you talking about?’
He had found the damp patch between her legs and was stroking her, finding her sensitive nub and playing with it so that she couldn’t think straight.
‘You can either retreat back into fighting with me and put this down as a one-night stand...’
Alexa flushed, because that had been her first thought. She had foolishly betrayed all her principles but maybe she could persuade herself that she had put the lapse behind her—because you didn’t have to keep repeating a mistake just because you’d made it once.
But how easy was that going to be when he could do this to her?
‘I can’t...can’t think...when you’re...’
‘Let me do the thinking for you.’
‘You’re so incredibly bossy. Do you always have to take charge?’
‘Taking charge suits me. I happen to do it very well.’
But this wasn’t a decision he wanted her to make on the back of her arousal—even though watching the dazed heat in her eyes and the hectic flush in her cheeks was immensely satisfying. He reluctantly withdrew his hand and rested it in the curve of her waist.
‘You’d like to write this off and pretend in the morning that nothing really happened.’
‘You can’t say that—’
‘I can, because I know the way you think, Alexa. You had a fairy-tale dream wedding and a dream guy all mapped out in your head, but instead here we are...’
It irritated him just to voice that, because playing second fiddle to any man—even a fictitious one—just wasn’t his thing, but there was no avoiding the truth.
‘You know what those marriage vows say...’ he drawled, carefully averting his eyes from the tempting glimpse of one pouting pink nipple peeping at him. ‘For better or for worse. Loosely interpreting them, I say we should focus on the better side of things for the moment... We fancy each other, incredible though that might be...’
‘Thanks very much, Theo.’
‘You’d be the first to agree,’ he returned wryly. ‘You were horrified to find out that you would be walking up the aisle with me.’
Alexa didn’t want to turn that flat statement back to him—didn’t want to hear that he had likewise been horrified to find himself saddled with an emotional and inexperienced girl who—horror of horrors—didn’t even have the decency to look like all his supermodel clones.
Truth hurt, and she had faced too many awkward truths recently—not least being this...her attraction to him.
‘I would have been horrified to find myself walking up the aisle with anyone who wasn’t of my own choosing.’
Theo shrugged, because one way or the other it didn’t matter.
‘I think that instead of denying what’s between us we exhaust it—after which the duration of our time together should be as plain sailing as it can be, given the circumstances.’
‘We exhaust it...?’
‘Correct.’
‘And do you have a timeline on that?’
If he got bored with all his beautiful conquests after a couple of months, then she gave herself a couple of weeks. Oddly, something inside her twisted.
‘I prefer to play things by ear—and that cuts both ways. You could be the one who gets tired of me...’
Alexa wasn’t dim enough to think that he seriously believed that for a minute, but she nodded in agreement. This wasn’t her at all, but he had cut through all the red tape and produced the bald truth of the matter, shorn of all emotion. They carried on having sex until that side of things dwindled away, at which point they would be able to function in one another’s company without that sizzle of electricity—which was something he seemed able to handle but which she had found she just couldn’t.
She couldn’t imagine ever being around him without the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end and her imagination shaking its reins and running wild. It would be like spending a year doing a high wire act without a safety net. Just thinking about it exhausted her.
He was presenting her with a choice. And why not? She couldn’t see herself wanting a man indefinitely when he basically wasn’t her type anyway. It would fizzle out. Of course it would. In the crazy, surreal world into which she had been catapulted it was the one thing that made sense.
And also...
She would be able to give herself permission to enjoy him.
She felt a guilty rush of pleasure at the thought of that.
‘I suppose it makes a weird kind of sense...’
She drew that sentence out and filled it with lots of doubt and uncertainty. She didn’t want him to feel that she was a push-over simply because she was inexperienced, or that she had become a member of his worshipful fan club. She wanted—needed him to think that it was an arrangement that suited her as much as it suited him...that he was as much a virus in her system which she wanted to dispel as she was in his.
‘I suppose we can’t help the people we’re attracted to—even though I always thought I could. I’ve been edgy around you...and not just because of the circumstances that threw us together. I haven’t liked being attracted to you, but I’m honest enough to admit that I am. Stupid, and—as you say—passing.’
Theo wasn’t sure he liked the word stupid, but he wasn’t going to get hung up on detail.
Frankly, the faster it passed, the better for him. She was unreasonably distracting and he didn’t like distraction—at least not a distraction that seemed to attack without warning and at any given time.
‘I have my guys coming tomorrow,’ he said. ‘My original plan involved a prolonged stay here, with work taking a bit of a back seat to relaxation. This...change in circumstances...requires a change of plan...’
He accompanied that with a slow, curling smile that reminded her just how dangerous a temptation he could be, so thank heavens it wasn’t going to be long-lasting.
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’ll just stay for the day. I’ll get my business done and then we’ll head to Manhattan—finish our stay there. And no adjoining rooms in a penthouse suite...’ He stroked the pink, peeping nipple and the little bud hardened under the abrasive rub of his thumb.
‘We can’t!’ Alexa gasped, responding on cue, pulses racing, her whole body slowly heating up once again and then going into meltdown as he continued to