I lean in, speaking the words near the curve of her brow, feeling her eyelids flutter beneath my kiss. She bites her full bottom lip.
“Do I have a vote in this?”
My lips curve into a smile and I trail my teeth along her temple, nipping at the nearby skin.
“Always.” I tap two inches below her circle of a belly button, hinting at the sexy space that lies below it. “And what would you say ‘her’ vote is?”
I feel Violet’s racing heart pick up at my sensitive touch. Her brow furrows, a horrible attempt to mask the sudden heat that’s fanning its way down her curvy body.
“Is that all you think about?” she scolds.
“Your pussy?” I pull backwards, separating Violet’s body from mine, meeting her cautious glare. I reach my hands blindly behind her, clutching the top of the head rest, my fingers digging their way into its leather. I grip its edge.
“Actually…yes, Keats,” I continue. “It is all I think about. That’s all I’ve thought about since I tasted it. Since I had my mouth on it and fucked it with my tongue. Since you came on my lips and I sucked you completely dry.”
I lean in closer, curling my fingers around the soft hair spread across her delicate nape.
“Does that answer your question?”
There’s a barely-contained fire happening behind Violet’s gem-like irises as she faces me—a muted heat glowing beneath her glare. I’m drawn to it. Like a moth to a flame. She looks as if she wants to take a pull closer, but doesn’t dare. And I know it… Because I feel the same thing.
Fucking scared that I might cross another boundary. Scare her off.
Violet’s fidgeting and tightly squeezed leg-cross was always a tell-tale sign of her nerves and even now, as she sits—her stance proud, one taut leg over the other, I know she’s scared of me. I can feel it.
And not that he-might-be-a-serial-killer type of way. But the other way.
An even worse way. That I-wish-I-didn’t-want-touch-you-so-fucking-much.
I know. Because I feel it in this moment, just staring at her. Regret I’d forgotten I had reaches inside my tequila-coated throat, making it sore. And I wish for so many things. I wish for willpower. I wish I had the man Violet deserves inside of me.
I open my mouth, unprepared for what I’m about to say when a camera lens—dark and large—shoves its way against the car window. The flash that follows is blinding, and I blink quickly only to open my eyes and find that the entire town car is surrounded by men and women in suits and microphones. The local media has found us, and they scream questions through the town car’s dark tinted windows.
“Heath!” A reporter in a fur-line trench coat shouts through the colored glass. “Can you speak on the rumors about King & Sparrow taking the Chris Jackson case?”
Fuck. How did the bastards see that I was in here? The tint is darker than the dead of night. I scramble to secure my clothes before re-buttoning Violet’s blouse, and with a press of a button to lower the partition and a frustrated “Drive!” to the chauffeur, we pull away from the curb outside of Violet’s brownstone, leaving a trail of cold correspondents in our wake.
The clamor of the crowd fades to the background noise of the bustling city around us, and as we speed away, we can’t help the burst of laughter that breaks from our throats, the threat of being caught with our pants down a visceral reality that we barely escaped.
Violet turns to me first, adjusting the button-down blouse my hands were just beneath. She smirks in my direction, dazzling me with her pale blue eyes. Her long lashes are a flutter against her pale cheeks, and she glances up at me, her button nose high, her bottom lip just as delectably red enough to bite. She inhales, closing her eyes.
“Can’t we ever have just have one normal moment?”
I snort. “I don’t know if anything between you and I was ever normal.”
“God forbid…” she hesitates, her head of ginger-colored hair tilting. She looks innocent, so sweet. Sweet enough to eat and I know that if I keep looking at her like I have since I first saw her, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Spread her wide for my tasting until my tongue can’t take anymore. I keep my gaze out the window as she silently regards me, her scrutiny more severe than ever before. She leans forward.
“And you having a constant driver doesn’t make it any more normal. Why? Do you have some type of secret life?”
Not the type that you think. I lie. “Hardly.”
“Hiding from a wife?”
“Nah.”
“Hiding from a husband?”
I stare at her, my eyes slanting. She shrugs. “What? I thought you said you had fun in the Rainbow Room…” She smiles, bowing her head, and I want to kiss the side of her mouth. She looks back up again. “You know, I haven’t thanked you yet for what you did…the other day in the office. When you helped me. It’s been easy for the senior partners to ignore me—keep things a secret, and I sort of…” She wrings her hands. “Reacted badly. Twice. With you showing up and then announcing yourself as Head Partner. I think—I think I went a little nuts.”
“Violet,” I say her name, reveling the taste. I finally look at her. “What I’ve put you through—leaving like that for LA after the night we spent together? Hell, what this company has put you through? It would make any fucking body nuts. And just for the record…” I tip her chin with my finger, liking the feel of her. “You are nuts…but the good kind. Normal is boring—everyday. And there’s nothing everyday about you, Violet Keats.”
She stares up at me, suddenly serious. The atmosphere in the small back seat of the car suddenly shifts and I can feel that Violet is ready to say something, but suddenly the car stops. I glance out the window only to find that we’ve finally parked in front of my apartment building—the BatCave location of my penthouse. A place I never take women.
This is a first.
I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here at fucking all.
In this city. Running my father’s firm. Talking to a woman I can’t touch. In a world I wasn’t invited to…
Again.
The bad decisions just keep on coming, but the moment I stepped into the bar and found Violet, the second I sat down beside her and got a whiff of her fantastic fucking smell, I knew I couldn’t just walk away. Not now. The sound of Violet’s soft sniff is imprinted on my mind and when she turned her teary-eyed gaze to me, sadness in her eyes, anguish molding her pretty mouth into a line, I realize that there is more to this attraction than what I once thought.
I liked this girl. I liked her a hell of a lot more than I let on.
But she doesn’t like me.
She brushed me off when we first met again in the bar with Brett and Elsie, ignored me in the office. Every day at King & Sparrow, before I could touch her, tango with her, say anything at all, she would head for the exit, half-sprinting on her way out, and like the puppy dog I’d suddenly become in her presence, I would fall in step behind her, scrambling for what the fuck to say.
All that would usually come out was a bark instead.
Right now, it sucks hairy fucking balls what I’m doing to her with David King’s bet—and I know it, and seeing her like this, saddened and alone, makes me want to stroke her misery away with my tongue…or something else that was just as soft that is suddenly rising, as I stare at her beautiful face, dying to wipe her salty tears dry. I touch her arm, lightly stroking.