Page 40 of The Last Kind of Kiss
And Bristol—sweet, hot, sexed-up Bristol with the face of a Versace model—has the golden key to all my answers in that flimsy little swimsuit of his.
“What are we supposed to do now? Just wait it out? What if it takes hours? Oh my God. What if it takes days? I can’t survive like this for days, Bristol. Everything hurts. It feels like my entire body’s on fire.”
He white-knuckles the edge of the bed. “Trust me, I’m not doing too great either.”
I stop my aimless pacing to relieve the ache between my thighs, and I’m confident in blaming those stupid chocolates for also increasing my emotional state, because I’m either a strongly worded tirade or a pitiful crying session away from breaking down completely. “I can’t believe the agency seriously thought an aphrodisiac would get me to sleep with you!” I scoff.
I don’t realize the fire I just lit underneath both of our feet—the fire that’s dead set on eating through the very flammable floorboards suspending us above a depthless lake.
Bristol takes point two seconds to lash out at me, the rumble in his throat forewarning the crack of a faraway avalanche. “You say a lot of shit, Lila, but none of it ever holds any merit.”
“Excuse me?” I spit.
“You act so high and mighty all the time. You act like there’s nothing between us when you and I both know that’s not the fucking truth.”
“Thereisnothing between us! You ruined that when you disappeared without an explanation!”
Suddenly, he stands up from the bed, pops my personal bubble with his six-foot-two body, and towers over me with enough intimidation to make the pulse between my legs flutter. “I know I messed up, but you throwing it in my face every chance you get isn’t going to change anything. You can hate me. You can drag my name through the dirt. But you’re not going to lie to me, do you understand?”
Bristol’s always been dominant. He’s not some flashy alpha male that boasts about how big his dick is, though. His dominance is quiet, subtle, like a creature soundlessly stalking its prey. He knows when to utilize his authority in the bedroom and on the ice. He doesn’t abuse it. It’s what attracted me to him in the first place—a man who’s confident but not arrogant, who’s instructive but not demanding, who’s equally in tune with his submissive side as he is his dominant.
Spatial awareness has never been his strong suit, and closeness hasn’t been mine. I’m a puddle of goo waiting to be shaped by his strong hands, and being six inches shorter than him doesn’t bode well for the state of my jellylike legs. He’s big. He’s daunting. He’s not going to back down until I convince him to, or until I confront him with all the firepower that I have.
So, I do the latter, because I made a promise to myself to never let him win, and here’s to keeping promises.
“You don’t get to have a say in what I do anymore because you’re not in my life, Bristol! Don’t you get that? I’m trying to move on and forget about the past, but you keep dragging me back into it!”
I give it less than five minutes before I’m screaming loud enough to wake up everybody on the yacht. My heart, strangely, isn’t anywhere near as loud. It’s not blaring out a war cry. It’s so still that I almost can’t feel it anymore.
A faint gloss materializes over his eyes, but he blinks it away. “I’m trying to fix things! I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, okay? I made the biggest mistake of my life when I walked away from you, and that’sallI know.” The guttural quality of his voice thins, making way for a reediness that I rarely hear.
“You keep saying how much you regret everything, yet I have no idea why you ended things in the first place,” I say.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Itshouldbe simple when it comes to the people you care about.”
Any smart person would quit while they’re ahead, but do I? You bet I don’t. I don’t civilly walk away. I don’t discuss my feelings in a calm and receptive manner. I poke the bear while the bear is down.
I rise to my tiptoes menacingly, look him dead in the eyes, then proceed to take that self-constructed delineation between us and toss it into the lake, watching as the last-standing boundary dissipates into a black cloud of nothingness.
“For your information, I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last man on Earth. Or if some brainless execs shoved an aphrodisiac down my throat.”
I go to shoulder my way past Bristol, but of course, he can never just let something die peacefully. He grabs my arm firmlyand glares at me in a way that I’ve never seen before—so fed up with my bullshit that the heat in his eyes births a newborn flame. “Prove it,” he demands, riddling my skin in goose bumps. “Prove you’re not attracted to me anymore.”
I rear backward. “What?”
He leans in an inch, and the warmth of his breath glides over my neck in the most delicious caress. “Kiss me, Lila. Kiss me once, without the cameras around, and prove to me that I don’t mean anything to you anymore.”
My body’s screaming a very obviousyes, but my head’s telling me a different story. God, I want to kiss him and prove him wrong. I want to kiss him and give him a false sense of security, then rip myself away at the last minute like he did to me a year ago. But once I start, I know I won’t be able to stop.
The feel of his fingers on my arm is orgasmic on its own, and desire pumps fast in my heart, rebuilding the broken amphitheater of my ribs. His mouth is mere inches away from mine, promising everlasting life in a bottle, and lust bursts behind my eyelids like a shock of lightning encroaching a cloud-studded horizon.
If I kiss him, there’s no going back. If I let him infiltrate my reinforced defenses, there’s no saying what he’ll do. Something so trivial—so mundane as a kiss—and yet it has the capacity to shatter our relationship permanently.
Bristol’s giving me the most irresistible puppy dog eyes right now, and he gently brushes his thumb over the inside of my wrist, imploring me to consider his offer—imploring me to remember how good it felt to kiss him.
One kiss. That’s all it is. I can pull away at any time.
