Page 93 of Reckless
“That is ” She set the glass down carefully.“not helping you look sane.”
“I’m not trying to look sane.”
Instead she looked very, very interested.
I looked at the crowd where Ben had disappeared and forced my attention back to her.“He likes you.”
Kelly’s eyes flashed.“A lot of people like me.”
The sentence landed directly in my chest.
I wanted her to claim me as I wanted to claim her.
“No, I don’t think you do.”
Her voice had changed.Lower now.More private somehow, even in a packed bar.
“Men have been flirting with me long before you got bored at dinner and decided I was convenient.”
I leaned in.“Kelly.”
“No.”She matched the movement, eyes bright now.“You don’t get to look possessive and then act like the world starts and stops where you notice me.”
That hit hard to deserve honesty.“Fair.”
She blinked once, like she hadn’t expected agreement.
“It still doesn’t mean I enjoyed him touching you.”
That made her breathing change.
“That sounds like your problem,” she said.
“It is.”
“And yet you’re making it my face.”
“I’m answering your question.”
She held my gaze for one long second.
And the room changed again.
The bar.The music.The people around us.All of it dropped a fraction farther away because whatever had cracked open in me when Ben touched her elbow had done something equally destabilizing to her.
“You know what,” she said quietly, “I think I do like this.”
I stared at her.
She stared back.
Her mouth softened the slightest fraction, and if the room had not been public, if we had not had exactly enough alcohol in our systems to make honesty reckless and not enough to make it stupid, I might have done something with that.
Instead I wrapped one hand around the edge of the table and said, “That is also my problem.”
She smiled then.
And for one completely unhelpful second, all I could think about was what she’d look like making that exact expression from much closer up.
