Page 48 of The Hanukkah Hoax
Like the exact heat his large hand gave off when he gripped her lower back, or the way his scar scraped ever so slightly against her upper lip when he kissed her, making her nipples harden.
His gruff voice pulled her back to the present. “To see what genuine humor looks like on you, without all the fluff of trying to be funny or laughing so others will like you. It’s so bloody tiring, the game we’re playing, isn’t it?”
Marisa’s throat had tightened to the point where she wasn’t even sure she could still push out the words she’d wanted to ask. God, he sounded just as exhausted as she felt, yet he still spoke to her like she’d not only hung the moon but the entire freaking galaxy. So what even were words at this point, when the only comfort her mind could wrap around came in the form of imagining Alec as he was, not as their arrangement presented him to be?
“Alec,” she rushed out over a swallow.
“You had a question for me,” he said heatedly, as if he knew exactly what she was about to pose. Was expecting it, hoping for it, even.
Then her fingers returned to where she’d left off before he called. “What if we played a different game? One where we didn’t have to pretend?” She took a deep, sobering breath, then added, “The one we started in the woods?”
No force on earth could slow Alec’s racing heart. It had flown off the runway and was veering toward whatever words Marisa chose to grace his senses with. And he’d fucking take all of them, even though he had earned none of them. Hell, she could curse him out in Gaelic, which he spoke not a word of, and he’d happily set her melodic profanities as his bloody ringtone.
He was in trouble. Big fucking trouble.
But the decision had already been made when he’d claimed her in front of the most influential people in town, and then again in front of his ex-girlfriend, and then again in front of her parents, random social media followers, his fucking brother’s dog.
So, what did it matter if he claimed her in this small way as well? For him and him alone? The way his body had been longing to?
And even more terrifying, what if she let him?
Alec shifted in his bed so he was flat on his back, his phone on speaker and lying on his heart. With his limbs free, he managed to kick Hugh out, though it earned him a threatening look of retribution made even more ominous by the dog’s angry jowls and preponderance of retaliatory drool.
His new boots out by the front door would probably suffer for his actions, but like he bloody well cared at the moment.
The only care he had in the world was for Marisa.
When he gave her back his full attention, he was met with little jitters of breathy sounds that weren’t filled with the confidence he’d heard in her a moment ago but were laced with more of that uncertainty she was always fighting off when they were in public together.
Did she want this? Want him? Fuck. Had he read things wrong? She was exhausted, that much he knew, and they were both still hurtling toward this mammoth deadline. Perhaps this wasn’t the best idea, even as his cock thumped out its disagreement against his leg.
Ornery wanker.
“I don’t want to play any games,” Alec said, and it was the truth. Games had winners and losers, and he couldn’t bear to see Marisa’s face on the other side of whatever it was they were playing at if she thought she’d lost.
“Oh,” she said, disappointment thick in her voice.
“Because right now, it’s just you and me. And that’s what I want. Just you and me. And we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
Another “Oh.” Then a heartbreakingly adorable gasp, followed by a more enlightened “Oooh.”
He smiled at what her lips must have looked like, all plump and pink, pushed out into a fetching O that pulled her beautiful brown eyes wider. It was enough that she was with him on the phone, that she hadn’t hung up on him after he’d called her at—he checked the time—near to bloody midnight when she’d just worked her arse off all day catering to people who likely didn’t appreciate her the way they should. It was enough that she?—
“Alec?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m, uh, wearing a tank top.”
He’d never been more convinced the woman was out to kill him.
Alec nearly choked on his tongue, with his most recent breath doing its damnedest to ensure he didn’t have a next one.
“Aye?” he croaked out while his lower abdominals tensed in time to the T’s she’d spoken in tank top.
“Aye,” she mimicked rather fucking cutely.
Bloody hell. Did the woman not know what state he was in, with his cock about to mutiny over his brain?
