Page 54 of Cruel Kiss

She turns fully in the circle of my arm to face me, which is a tactical error on her part, because now, there's no wall to look at and nothing between us but a few inches of hot living-room air.

"That's not fair!"

"Blame yourself. You're the one who wrote the rules."

"I wrote them expecting you to—" She stops.

"To what? Break them the first time it got inconvenient?" I tilt my head. "Not my style."

Her jaw does a marvelous little clench. She hates that she can't argue with it. And underneath the hating, in the amber ring around her pupils, there's something that looks an awful lot likewanting, and it's directed straight at me. I want to make it easy for her, but I won't. Not this. This one she has to choose.

"Fine," she breathes.

She goes up on her toes.

She's slow about it, agonizingly, criminally slow, close enough that I feel her exhale against my lips before I feel anything else. She hovers there. A featherweight. A rumor of a kiss.

Her nose brushes mine. I keep my hand exactly where it is on her hip, fingers going white with the effort of not gripping, not dragging her in, not doing every single thing I'm dying to do…

Then she closes the last half-inch.

It's barely a kiss. It's theideaof a kiss, the ghost of one, her mouth resting against mine as light as a moth landing?—

And it detonates anyway.

I feel it go off in my chest. Her hand fists in the front of my shirt, and for one glorious, ruinous second, she leans in like she means to make it a real one, tongue and teeth and everything I've been thinking about since the dark hallway last night.

I don't move. I don't grip. I stand there and take it and let her have all the control. It's the hardest thing I have ever done in a life absolutely stuffed with hard things.

Then she rips herself back.

We stare at each other. She's flushed to the collarbone, chest going up and down, lips parted and slick, and I know, Iknow,I look no better.

"Okay. That'll do," she says.

In a relationship built on lies, that might be the flimsiest one of them all.

"Convincing," I manage to say. Mine's no better.

"Yeah." She lets go of my shirt. "Real. Yeah. That looked—that looked real." She takes a step back, then another, retreating toward the stairs, one hand pressed flat to her own sternum. "Muscle memory. Fire drill. Done."

"Yep," I agree. "Done."

"I have to—there's a thing. Upstairs. A work thing." She's already got a foot on the bottom step. "For the company. My company. That I own again."

"Of course."

"So."

"So," I echo.

She flees. Actually flees, robe flapping, socks skidding on the landing, and then a door slams shut.

I stand alone in the middle of the rug.

I take the small velvet ring box out of my pocket, where it's been the whole time, and I look at it, but I don't open it.

Then I sit down very carefully on the arm of the couch and wait, with a great deal of patience, for my body to remember the terms of the deal.