Page 8 of One Snowy Seduction
Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
His mind screamed, but his eyes ignored and he watched her walk from the island to the refrigerator. Those pajama pants were way too thin. They hugged her ass—which by the way looked a lot nicer than he’d recalled—and his palms itched to reach out and touch. Or grab, massage, knead, kiss. With a deep inhale he wondered at all the things he could do with an ass like that. And it didn’t help to drag his gaze upward. That shirt that matched the lovely pants rode high enough that he caught glimpses of the smooth skin of her midriff. Another place he’d like to trace his fingers or tongue along. The way his dick twitched at those thoughts almost made him feel like a horny teenager again. Those days when he’d sit in the back of the classroom and watch all the girls wearing their tight jeans and even tighter sweaters walk past him like he didn’t even exist. He’d go home at night and dream about those same rude girls, his overly hormonal body reacting to the way he’d decided to see them in his mind.
He’d never really taken the time to think of Teesha in this way, especially not after…
“Hello?” She called to him. “You still here or did your mind get lost in Hogwarts?”
Blinking quickly didn’t actually stop his mind from imagining all the places he’d like to touch on her body, so he took a deep breath and released it slowly instead. “Find something you want to fix in there?”
She tilted her head as if she didn’t really think that’s what he wanted to say. Who was he kidding? There was a really good chance she knew what he was thinking, or at least that he hadn’t been thinking about whatever was in that refrigerator. There’d been a time when they could almost read each other’s minds, that’s how close they were.
“Why did you do it?” she asked, her tone suddenly softer than it had been.
“Why did I do what?”
She closed the refrigerator door and then rested her hands behind her on the counter. Standing that way lifted her shirt a little more and he glimpsed a flash of gold on a piercing at her navel. That was new, but what he suspected she was referring to was not.
“Why’d you sabotage my entry in the competition? Did you really want to win that badly? I mean, that you had to blow up our friendship?”
“So, we’re doing this now?” he asked and pushed his hands into the front pockets of his sweatpants. “I wanted to talk about this that night, but you rushed off.”
She shrugged. “Well, I’m here now. At least for tonight anyway.”
“Ok, well—” He paused, glanced over toward the stove and then held up a finger to Teesha. “Just a sec.”
After he’d crossed the kitchen again, turned off the burner under the sauce and stirred the pasta, lowering the flame beneath that pot as well, he faced her again. She hadn’t moved from where she stood beside the refrigerator, but she had repositioned her arms so that her hands were clasped in front of her while she waited for his response.
“Your project was good,” he began. “It was really good. The simulation sequences you’d worked out and the ease with which your design played out on the screen it was all impeccable work.”
“That’s not what you said when I showed it to you.” That spot between her brows crinkled, just as it always did when she was confused about something. “Why did you say all that other, horrible stuff?”
“Because you needed to hear it,” he said and before she could fly off into a rage again the way she had that night, he continued. “I said your project was good, Teesha. But it was also safe. You wrote that code in the way you always wrote code. I’d seen you do it a billion times, one time after you’d helped me drink a bottle of Apple Crown. Creating those simulations was like breathing to you but the Yatlig internship was the bigtime. We’d researched everything about Maury Yatlig and his company so we both knew that. I wanted your project to blow them away. I wanted you to give it everything you had and then something that you hadn’t even tapped into yet. You needed that push.”
“I needed my best friend not to sabotage my chances,” she snapped.
He shook his head. “I would never.” Cursing, he walked over to her and reached for her hands. When she stiffened, he paused and let his arms fall back to his sides. “I wanted you to get the internship, to move up in the industry and prove to your parents that you were meant to be a game developer. I wanted everything for you that you dreamed of and more, Teesha. So much more.”
“You told me I was being lazy,” she said looking down at her hands. She was rubbing her fingers, twisting her hands as she shook her head. “You said I was too afraid to try so I was submitting this sloppy work. You said I needed to get my head in the game or stop playing in the big leagues. You said…”
Closing the space between them, he resisted the urge to touch her because he wasn’t sure she wanted his touch. But he couldn’t stay away from her, he couldn’t listen to the hurt in her voice as she tossed the words, he’d said so long ago back at him and not do everything in his power to make her understand this time. “I know what I said and I know how it must’ve sounded to you, but I tried to tell you. I tried to make you understand, you just didn’t want to hear anything else I had to say.”
She shook her head. “And I don’t know if I should listen now.”
“I didn’t say those things to hurt or sabotage you, only to push you to do better.”
She looked up at him, her eyes brimming with anger. “I didn’t need your push. I needed my friend’s encouragement.”
“I don’t lie to my friends, Teesha. And I certainly never lied to you.”
“I trusted you,” she whispered.
He nodded. “And that’s exactly why I felt free to say what I thought needed to be said.”
“But what if you were wrong?” she asked.
“Did you win the internship?”
Silence fell between them, but their gazes held.
