Page 94 of Fall For Me
“I’d love to take you on a date,” he says when he stops laughing. His hand slides up my spine, fingers splaying between my shoulder blades. “Asking you out was actually my plan tonight. Before Emma showed up.”
My stomach swooshes, plunging like a rollercoaster cresting its first hill.
“And I’d die to kiss you goodnight at the end of the date too,” he continues, his voice dropping lower. “And if you didn’t invite me in?—”
He releases my hand to spin me out in a turn. The room blurs, the lights streaking across my vision, and then he’s pulling me back, closer than before, my chest pressed flush against his.
“—I wouldn’t mind,” he finishes, his lips brushing my ear. “Because I wouldn’t want it to be only about sex either.”
My breath catches.
We’ve stopped pretending to dance. We’re standing in the middle of the floor, holding each other, while the music swells around us and the crowd moves in patterns we’re no longer part of.
I look up at him—at the sharp cut of his jaw, the gray of his eyes gone silver in the dim light, the curve of his lips.
Then I stand on my tiptoes and kiss my husband.
33
PEYTON
Liam has to call one of the hotel cars to get us back to the house as none of us is fit to drive and he came with the bike. We drop Lila off first, so he beats us home. Emma and I pile through the front door in a mess of laughter and cold air and the lingering buzz of too much tequila. Emma hops to kick off her boots, and the bouncing sends her devil horn headband skidding across the marble foyer. Liam catches it against his foot like a hockey puck, and the look he gives me over Emma’s head—dark, heated, full of unfinished business—lights up the fire in my belly all over again.
My entire body is buzzing. Not from the shots, those burned off somewhere between the dance floor and the drive home, but from a different kind of intoxication. The molecular, cellular inebriation that comes from kissing a man you like and hearing him say he likes you back.
I want to grab him by the letterman jacket and drag him upstairs.
But Emma is here. My beautiful guardian devil, who has stumbled barefoot into the living room and is admiring the moonlit lake beyond the glass walls.
“Are you sure this view is real?” she asks. “That these aren’t screens projecting what the Matrix wants us to see?”
Liam moves behind the kitchen island, filling a glass of water and setting it on the counter for Emma without being asked. He grabs a second one for me.
For a moment, we’re both holding the glass, its smooth, icy surface a contrast to the heat of Liam’s skin where it brushes mine. He holds my gaze with the intensity of someone who’s staring at a locked door he’s considering kicking in.
He lets go of the glass, but not of the eye contact.
“I’m heading up.” His rough voice vibrates in my sternum. “You two have fun.”
He kisses my temple. His lips linger against my hairline, as the slow drag of his exhale burns against my skin in a promise. A placeholder for everything we can’t do tonight.
Then he pulls away and disappears up the stairs.
When I catch Emma’s gaze across the room, she’s grinning.
“In here,” she commands, pointing toward the guest bedroom. “Now.”
We change into pajamas and climb into the queen bed, pulling the covers up to our chins. The lamp on the nightstand casts a warm, golden circle around us.
We lie on our sides, heads on the pillows, faces inches apart.
Emma studies me. She reaches out and taps the tip of my nose with her index finger.
“Someone,” she says, “is in love with her husband.”
My stomach flips. “I’m not in love.”
“Liar liar, pants on fire.”
