Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 71698 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71698 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 358(@200wpm)___ 287(@250wpm)___ 239(@300wpm)
Stop.
Her eyes practically cross, but even that’s sexy. “Would this be a sorry kiss? Pity kissing? Mercy kissing?”
“I’d like to kiss you because you’re beautiful, and you’re real. I like that. I like you.” My voice drops, and it’s low and gravelly. If kissing has a voice, we’re making out already.
“I’ve been lying to you for years about how I felt,” she points out, her hand grasping the hem of her T-shirt and balling up the extra fabric, pulling it tight over her breasts and the slight curve of her hips.
“Trying to save someone from themselves isn’t lying to them.” I snap my eyes back up to her face.
She frowns. “Was I saving myself?”
“I meant me.”
“I… how did I do that?”
Her eyes don’t stay on mine. They leave and slowly trace down. Lower and lower. Lower yet. We’re on the same side of the island now, so there’s nothing to hide the very obvious red leather pants problem.
My pulse spikes. She asked me a question, and I need to focus and answer. “With your friendship, your loyalty, your laughter, your smiles, and being an integral part of our team. Not to mention your patience, your sacrifice, and your songs. You learned how to play guitar. You wrote me songs like I’ve never seen anyone write songs. You used the language that transcends words and goes straight into feeling.”
“You write songs all the time,” she protests, her cheeks immediately staining a bright pink that keeps getting darker and darker.
Ahh, we’re both notoriously bad at getting compliments.
She digs her bare toes into the floorboards and locks her hands in front of her waist, studying them. “I’m pretty sure it’s actually just an overblown crush. I’ll get over it. As soon as you leave here, which has to be soon, because of dinner. Buns. Roast. Potatoes. Carrots. Gravy. My mom. She’s coming home soon.”
“If I kissed you, would we still have time for all that?”
Her head snaps up, and she gulp-gasps, sucking in air in a not-so-classy manner, but even that is sexy as hell because it’s her.
“I might, but I don’t know about you,” she answers. “You’ll have to have enough time to glue your fake beard back on before you leave.”
“Is there a reason your mom can’t meet me?”
“Yes. She’d realize in a second, as soon as she saw us together, how I feel about you, and you’re not… we’re all wrong in all the technical ways.” She gestures wildly back and forth. “She’d turn into therapist mom—not in a bad way, but it would still happen—and she’d help me realize all over again why this would never work. It would be so real. The ending of the tour and my job all over again. Or even worse, she might talk about wanting something bad enough, and compromise and solutions. Too many positives that would throw me into a tailspin and make me question everything.”
That doesn’t sound so bad to me. I do realize she’s not panicking, and what she just said might contain more than a little bit of satire. “Your job doesn’t have to end. I’d hire you back in a second for whatever I have coming next.”
She winces. “That’s not the problem.”
“I know it’s not.”
“The real problem is that once is never once, and goodbye is never a proper goodbye. Even if I never saw you again, you’d linger. It’s been the worst and best form of torture, being so close to you for all these years. If you kissed me, you might wreck me.”
Oof. Okay. No satire there. Just honesty that slays me.
Her lips purse. She takes one step back, but then they purse extra, and she steps forward. Then she takes one more step forward, this one bringing her closer. Her eyes are so big. So blown. Her tongue slicks across her bottom lip, and I realize this is it.
I’m standing here, catching an obsession.
I can’t stop my skin from breaking out into goosebumps, my heart from kicking up into an even higher level of overdrive, or my gaze from fixating entirely on Carissa’s mouth. I’m being way too intense, but I can’t make myself stop. I can’t step back or away. I can’t go and find my costume and reassemble it. If I kiss her, my dick is going to get harder, messing up the ratio of blood flow to my brain even further, and my reasoning will become entirely flawed.
Her breaths shallow out. “If you’re going to kiss me, you had better do it.”
“Gah!” Fuck. Totally a bad time to make fish faces and noises.
“Fake beards probably take quite a while to put back in place, not to mention the wig and the glasses and—”
I step forward and cup her face.
She immediately falls into stunned silence.
Shit, it’s already happening. My brain is going straight to dick-induced mush. It’s that if I don’t kiss her, I’m going to regret it forever. I’m already regretting that I didn’t properly see her. That even when I thought I wasn’t, I was up in my head. And even when I’m being the most open, I still close a part of myself off and hide it away. I half feel that if I don’t kiss her, I won’t be able to stand it. And it’s not just my pants giving the orders because they’re so done with trying to contain my package in an already too-tight area to begin with, all while blood circulation is getting low.