He took another step back.
Hayden smiled widely. “Are you afraid of me, Nolan Martin?”
He scoffed. “Of course not.” His voice was firm, but alarm bells started going off in his brain. He was afraid of something. Maybe himself?
Why was she standing so close to him?
“You don’t like my influence on your sister . . .” She flattened a hand on his chest and he felt her touch like a brand. “What about my influence on you?”
He backed up another step and collided with his desk.
He must look a coward, backpedaling from someone he outweighed by fifty pounds at least.
She followed with one more step, closing in, her hand still on his chest, directly over his heart. Her gaze dropped to where they were connected, and then back up to his face. “Your heart is racing. Why is that?”
“What are you doing?” he rasped.
“Just wondering if this is even about your sister and me at all. Wondering if it’s about you and me?”
You and me.
No such combination existed. There was only Nolan and Priscilla. Ask anyone.
He inhaled and tasted that indefinable other that was quintessentially Hayden. Until that moment he didn’t realize he knew her scent. He didn’t realize he had marked it and cataloged it in his head as Hayden Vargas.
Her upturned face was so close, and he had to face the truth.
It wasn’t that he couldn’t move away.
He just didn’t want to.
Lesson #21
Save face-holding for serious intimacy. Not for a casual make-out.
x Hayden x
What am I doing? Hayden inched her face a little higher. A little closer. Nolan was tall, but she wasn’t a short girl. She used to bemoan that fact. Not a year of school went by that a basketball coach didn’t sniff around all five feet nine inches of her hopefully. Laughable, really. Even if she wanted to play sports, being involved in extracurricular activities required a level of support from parents that she just didn’t have. Plus, she needed to work, which didn’t leave much time for sports.
It was almost as if Hayden were floating outside of her body. She’d wanted to prove a point, teach him a lesson of his own. But without conscious thought, she had closed the last bit of distance separating her from Nolan and brushed her mouth over his, testing him, soft as a brushstroke. Testing herself, too, she supposed.
He held himself still, and that was different. She usually didn’t need to coax a guy into kissing her. His lips quivered under hers, but otherwise they didn’t move. He didn’t kiss her back. He didn’t grab her or crush his mouth to hers or jump on her like some overeager puppy.
She pulled back, staring at him in awe. And perhaps a little bit of confusion, but whether it was at him or herself, she couldn’t decide.
His liquid-dark eyes glittered in the shadows of the room as she assessed him. He really had the deepest, most beautiful eyes. She wondered what was going on behind them. What was he thinking?
She shifted her fingers on his solid chest. His heartbeat was still going mad against her palm. He was affected, and that gave her a small thrill . . . made her feel powerful—as seductive as his sister thought her to be.
Despite Hayden’s bold words, she always thought he failed to see her, or he looked through her blindly. Or around her. Or over her. Never really her. Never Hayden. Just the myth of her. What people said about her.
Nolan wasn’t moving away though. Of course, she had backed him into his desk, but a big guy like him could stop her or pull away.
She knew it was madness, but she moved her face closer again, stopping just shy of kissing him. “Is this okay?” she whispered. She’d been around a lot of people in her life who were takers. They took and never asked. She would not be one of them.
A ragged breath escaped him. “Yeah.”
She pressed her mouth to his almost tentatively.
She had started all this as a way to rattle him, to push him just a little for judging her, but now it felt like something else. Something bigger. Something she was doing to herself—her own torment. Because if he rejected her . . . spurned her, well, it wouldn’t feel great.
Nolan’s previous restraint cracked, just a fissure, as he bent his head a fraction, making it so she didn’t have to stretch up on her toes to reach him.
His lips were warm and dry and perfectly soft. Who knew a guy’s mouth could be this soft? This gentle?
Hayden deepened the kiss, unconsciously adding her other hand to his chest. He brought up his own to cover hers to anchor them, his palms completely swallowing her hands as he kissed her back, slowly at first but then with increasing pressure.
Ah, hell. He was into it. Into her . . . and she reveled in it, feeling as though she had won something.
His lips, the warm clasp of his palms on the back of her hands, the strength and solidness of him against her—it all went straight to her head in a way that she never experienced before. And she was used to kissing guys.
But this felt different.
Despite the rumors of her wild ways, she had only ever been drunk once. When she was fourteen, her mother had a bunch of her questionable friends over for a New Year’s party. They had all enjoyed pumping Hayden with alcohol and sitting back to watch her antics. Like she was some little circus monkey performing tricks for them. They’d laughed and encouraged her, applauding.
She remembered their laughter when she fell down the front porch steps and bloodied her nose on the concrete. They had thought that was uproariously funny.
She’d hurt all over the next day. Her entire body felt like it had been through hell.
That was the last time she’d consumed alcohol, but she recalled the pleasant fuzzy-headed sensation leading up to the moment when she crashed and burned. The feeling of invincibility, of flying and not quite belonging to her own body. It had been euphoric.
She felt that way now kissing Nolan. Euphoric. Like she was flying.
Her hands slid up his chest and around his neck while his hands went to her face with a groan she took for approval.
His warm palms cupped her cheeks, his thumbs dragging in small circles over her skin. He held her face as though touching her was as necessary as breathing.
Save face-holding for serious intimacy. Not for a casual make-out.
Her lips stilled. All of her stilled as her own advice from earlier replayed in her head.
Oh no. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
Nolan sensed her withdrawal and lifted his mouth from hers.
His dark eyes flickered over her face just as some distant cries of excitement rose up from somewhere in the house.
She gave herself a mental shake and backed away, letting his hands drop from her face.
Feet stomped on the stairs, accompanied by excited voices.
“Hayden,” he whispered.
She shook her head. She didn’t know what he wanted to say—what that simple utterance of her name even meant. She didn’t want to know.
The shouts carrying through the house provided a welcome distraction. “Snow! Snow!”
She looked over his shoulder to the window beyond his desk and saw what all the commotion was about. Snow flurries.
She had been in elementary school the last time it snowed. She remembered it because she and her mom had made snow angels in the yard. It was a good day. A good memory. Rare.
“It’s snowing.” She nodded to the window, stating the somewhat obvious.