Page 59 of Best Kind of Trouble
“Good. Let’s keep it rolling a little while longer. Turn your back while I get this set up.”
I don’t like turning my back. Not on most people. Not after what I’ve been through, but I don’t feel anything but bubbling anticipation when I swivel my chair around. Liam slides his seat forward with a small scrape of metal against the linoleum flooring.
I hear the muted click-clack of keys, followed several moments later by what sounds like a church choir singing.
“You’ve taken my need for inspiration very literally,” I say as I rotate the chair back around. I grin at him when I see theopening credits for a movie on my computer screen. “We’re really watchingRocky?”
“Damn straight. You need a break, Briar. Let’s take a break.” He runs a hand across his stubbled jaw. “These movies are cliché at this point, but they meant something in the beginning. That was a lesson to me. Not everything that’s popular is bad.”
I stare at him in the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights overhead, at a loss for words.
“This means a lot to me,” I say, the truth of it expanding inside of my chest like a new universe. No man has ever made me feel supported like this. Jonah’s support had all been delivered in brittle promises, never in actions. “It’s hard to put it into words.”
He lifts a finger to his lips. “So you’d better not try. C’mon, Briar, we don’t want to miss this part.”
It’s obvious he doesn’t like to take compliments.
“Yeah, wouldn’t want to miss all the singing,” I say in a soft voice, as if we’re in a movie theater and not huddled together in the office. It truly doesn’t look like my space in any way. I haven’t replaced the sternI’m the bosschair or put up any art prints on the walls. Part of me is afraid to, as if doing so will make my failure a certainty rather than just a possibility. “I know that’s what Rocky’s known for.”
He brushes his knuckles softly against my arm. “Glad you see things my way.”
His slightly rough skin sends a shiver through me, and I find myself wondering what it would feel like for him to touch me other places. Most of the men I’ve dated have been soft, suited, and civilized, like Jonah. Intimacy would be different with Liam, but I’ll never experience it—a thought that makes my skin feel too tight.
“You got hurt,” I say abruptly, lifting myfingers to the bruise on his cheek, skating lightly over the skin. “You were practicing?”
He captures my hand in his and holds on for a second—heat pouring between us—before lowering his arm.
“I was,” he says, his voice a little rough. “I’m training for a local tournament at the end of January.”
“I don’t like the thought of someone hitting you.”
He gives me a wicked grin that I feel in all the places I’ve declared closed for business.
“Who says I’ll be the one who gets hit?” he asks, then nods to the screen. “Focus, Princess. Therewillbe a quiz.”
We watch the movie side by side in our chairs. It feels companionable, but there’s something else hazing the air between us, the tension that’s been there since Sunday night. It ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t go away.
He works for you.
He’s Hannah’s brother, and she said to stay away.
He’s never serious about women.
He’ll break your heart, again.
But the pulsing awareness I have of him doesn’t care about any of that. All it cares about is the strong arm that touches mine when he laughs and the sidelong looks he gives me at his favorite parts of the movie.
We’ve watched it for maybe forty minutes before I pause it and gesture to the small green, leather-upholstered loveseat positioned next to the office door. Sometimes Dad had meetings with multiple people, and he’d sit on the couch and position his visitors across from him on the tiny chairs.
“You must be uncomfortable in that chair,” I say. “We could turn the screen around and sit there.”
He glances at the couch and then at me. “We could.”
“Should we?” I ask, feeling awash in self-consciousness.
It’s his stare. It’s soaking into my skin and spreading.
“We shouldn’t, but I think we’re going to anyway. This chair feels like it was constructed to torture people.”
