Page 28 of Mission: Submission
His grin came back. The full one, slow and warm, the weapon he'd aimed at me the first morning and kept deploying every day since. "We'll revisit."
"We won't."
"We'll see."
I pulled my hand back and went to pour the next round. He stayed on his stool and drank his bourbon and watched me work the bar for the next hour, and every time I passed his end of the rail his eyes tracked me with a focus that made my skin warm under my clothes.
At ten-thirty the crowd thinned. I leaned across the bar to collect his empty glass and he caught my wrist again, thumb on the bracelet, and pulled me close enough that his mouth was near my ear.
"What time do you close tonight?"
"Midnight."
"That's ninety minutes."
"You can count. I'm impressed."
"I've been thinking about what I'm going to do with you after those ninety minutes." His voice was low, just for me, and it hit the base of my spine and stayed there. "I have plans."
"You had plans for the I-love-you and look how that turned out."
"These are better plans." His thumb moved on my wrist, slow. "These involve your apartment and significantly less conversation."
"Bold of you to assume I'm inviting you over."
"You're already blushing."
"I don't blush. It's the bar heat."
"Jenna." He pulled back just enough to look at me, and the gray eyes had gone dark, and the grin had gone from warm to dangerous. "It's not the bar heat."
I laughed. I couldn't help it — the confidence, the absolute certainty he wore when he wanted me, how he could make my pulse jump with four words while I was holding a dirty rocks glass in a room full of people. He was impossible and I was going to keep him.
"Midnight," I said. "Don't be late."
"I'll be at the door at eleven fifty-nine."
"You'll be at the door when I unlock it and not a second before."
He picked up his fresh glass and leaned back on his stool and gave me that grin — slow, devastating, a promise — and I turned back to work and felt him watching me from his stool at the end of the rail, the same way he'd watched me that first Thursday night. The same gray eyes, the same steady focus. Except now when I looked back, I didn't turn away. I held his gaze across my bar and let him see exactly what was on my face and his smile widened.
