Page 25 of Wide-Eyed
“Just kiss me?—”
“No.”
“Kiss me,” she insisted.
“No, I don’t want to.”
She froze, and for a second, she looked hurt. Then horror spread over her face. “Oh, god. This is coerced consent. I’m coercing you! I’m so sorry, Mike. Of course you don’t have to kiss me if you don’t want to. I know I’m not appealing like that.”
Her horrified expression did something to me. It was like emotional IBS. There was a tugging sensation behind my belly button telling me to move, to leap into action, to fix it, to soothe her, make her feel better.
Being sexually frustrated I could endure. But seeing her look hurt and rejected like this? Every single cell in my body was rioting.
I just couldn’t handle Lyssa thinking she was the problem. She was every kind of appealing to me, and that was the problem.
And it was my problem, not hers.
“Princess, if I wanted you off my lap,” I said roughly, “You’d be off. Now hold still.”
I dropped a quick kiss on her lips.
At least, that was my plan.
But her lips were soft and gentle, and I lingered. I didn’t move to deepen the kiss, but I didn’t pull away either. We stayed exactly like that, pressed together for seconds longer than we should have. She was soft. Sweet. As strange as this girl was to me and to Woodville, my mouth didn’t know that. It liked the feel of her.
Much too late, I pulled away.
Lyssa climbed off my lap and brushed down her skirt. “Interesting.”
I wanted to tell her that wasn’t my best work—it was supposed to just be a friendly, reassuring sort of kiss. Between friends. For friendship.
Instead, I adopted my familiar bravado and winked at her. “Congratulations, baby. You just got the Mike Holliday experience.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not how you really kiss. You were humoring me.”
Determined to stay cool, I leaned back in my chair, suppressing a wince. “Sorry, Princess. That’s all you’re getting.”
She said nothing for six heartbeats, then wordlessly disappeared down my hallway. Moments later, she was back with a bag of peas she’d fished out of the chest freezer by the back door. With a grunt of thanks, I put them on my ribs. When she politely asked if there was anything else I needed, I shook my head.
After that, she closed the door to her room with a firm click. I gingerly shuffled around in the kitchen, switching off the lights and checking all the doors were locked. My alarms were set for 8.45 a.m., because I was working at the café tomorrow, not the farm and only needed fifteen minutes to get there.
Once I was in my jim-jams, a pair of flannel pants that had been washed so many times the print was almost gone, I flicked off the lights and laid in the dark, staring at the ceiling.
I was in hot water.
What the fuck had I been thinking? You couldn’t kiss someone in a friendly way. I just had to go to sleep. That was all. Easy as. Just close my eyes and sleep. I wasn’t going to get up and go down the hall. I wasn’t going to pull my laptop out and resume the last video I’d been watching. I was NEW MIKE now. A changed man. With goals. Purpose. Blah blah.
I wasn’t going to be the kind of man who couldn’t keep his hands off his houseguest, even if she was warm for my form; and soft and sweet in my lap and kissed like she wondered if it was a dream.
I could feel my resolve wavering.
Figuring the lesser capitulation was better, I propped my laptop on my belly and opened YouTube, hitting play on the video I was halfway through, which was the only one in this series that I hadn’t seen already.
As I watched my houseguest talk animatedly about styling Croc Jibbitz, I tried not to think about what would have happened at my dining table if she hadn’t gotten up—if I’d tightened my arms around her and pulled her closer so she could feel exactly how much I wanted her.
I tried.
Failed.
