Page 46 of Golden Touch
He tastes like lime juice and danger—the good kind, the kind I suspected on that first night when we were two strangers across the bar. I knew it would be like this—one of his bold hands skimming down my back to palm my ass, and my traitorous body thrumming with anticipation.
Suddenly, I’m lifted off the sofa and deposited onto his lap. The kiss becomes a full body experience, and so it’s hard to think when I’m surrounded by a hard-bodied man who’s sucking on my tongue and teasing my nipples through my clothes.
Thinking is overrated anyway. I can feel the need rolling off his body, and we’re in such perfect sync it almost hurts.
Until everything suddenly stops. The kiss ends as abruptly as it began, and I’m deposited gently on my own side of the sofa.
Panting, I stare up into his flushed face, too revved up to pretend indifference.
“You said we weren’t sleeping together tonight.” His voice is pure gravel, and his color is high. Like I’ve done the same thing to him that he’s done to me.
“Okay. Right.” My sluggish brain fights for the proper response. “I meant it, too.” Although this statement is dubious coming from a woman whose bosom is literally heaving right now.
He grins. “Make no mistake, lady. Someday soon, I’m going to bang you like a screen door in a hurricane. But you said that wasn’t happening tonight, so I’m going to turn in. I got a call at seven a.m. with that asshole who calls himself my father, so I’m gonna need my Zs.”
“Right,” I say, my mind a beat behind as I straighten my clothing.
Ididsay I wasn’t going to seduce him. And he listened, which is a rare thing for a man to do.
So why am I suddenly so disappointed?
Shake it off, Livia. I grab my drink off the coffee table and get up. “Sleep well,” I say. “And, um, thanks for the extra locks.”
“My pleasure,” he says in a deep voice.
I drop my glass in the sink and head to the bathroom, where I stare into the mirror. The woman who looks back has windblown hair and kiss-bitten lips. I whisper to her, “Don’t be an idiot. We’re swearing off men.”
She replies, “Even the super-hot ones?”
“Even those,” I whisper back.
“We never have fun anymore,” she points out. “Like, never. A little fun wouldn’t kill us.” But then she frowns, because she knows that’s not true.
A little funwith Razor turned into some very big regrets.
I look away from the mirror and brush my teeth.
When I finally emerge from the bathroom, Nash is still on the sofa, but now he’s reading a paperback novel, a book light clamped to the cover. “Night, pussycat.”
“Night.”
He shuts off the book light and sets the book on the floor. Then he closes his eyes.
And doesn’t move, except to raise his inked arm over his head and make himself more comfortable.
“Nash...?”
“Mmm?”
“What are you doing?”
“Sleeping,” he says. “You should try it.”
“But why are you on the couch?”
He opens his eyes. “Because your bed is off limits. And some asshole wants to get his hands on you. He wants to take you somewhere you won’t tell me, but it has something to do withyour ex and those scars on your arm. And possibly something to do with chaining you to a chair. And so I gotta take this threat seriously.”
My eyes practically bug out. “But the doors are locked. You fixed them yourself.”
