“Hey!” I shouted, giving him a shove as I got to my feet.
He popped up with almost comical quickness. His dark eyebrows were squeezed together like he was already imagining all the ways he wanted to dismantle me piece by piece. For a child kicking, foul mouthed asshole, he was admittedly handsome. Even if I deducted something like ten or twenty points off the attractiveness scale for obvious personality faults, he still clocked in at a ten out of ten, and that made me hate him even more.
He was one of those guys that was obnoxiously blessed by nature. He had the posture of a soldier with a straight back, neck, and the sort of lean muscularity I’d always preferred on men. Basically, if they couldn’t wipe their own asses, they needed to take a break from the gym, and I was fairly sure Mr. Grump could reach his ass just fine with those long… Stop. And please, Chelsea, for the love of God, never picture a hot stranger wiping their own ass again. That’s not good for anybody.
The point was, the more I looked at him, the more I found for my eyes to enjoy. He had a defined nose, a little mole to the side of his mouth that was, of course, oddly appealing. He even had this sort of bow shape to his full lips that was doing dangerous things in my brain. To top it all off, he had nearly black, perfect hair and a pair of blue eyes bright enough to read a book by under the blankets.
“Hey?” For the first time, he didn’t sound icy and calm. “You have got to be the most insane, f—”
“Who shuts a door on someone in the middle of a conversation?”
“It wasn’t a conversation! I was trying to get away from you.”
“Which one is it? You want to get away, or you want to prove to your fragile ego that you can make me say ‘yes?’”
His eyes narrowed into little slits, which made the corners of his cheeks crinkle in a frustratingly sexy way. And just like that, all the fuming anger I’d felt—not just toward him but about the whole situation that led to me coming here today—seemed to flicker and shift inside me. My belly went hot, and my knees threatened to turn soft.
Stop it, knees. We’ve practiced this whole standing thing a couple times, so don’t pretend to be incompetent on me now.
“I should leave you alone,” I said quietly. I reached for the door, but he pressed his palm to it, stopping me.
“You don’t get to talk to me the way you did and walk away, Chelsea.”
I swallowed. I was the most stubborn person I knew. He thought he could rock my world. I saw it in his eyes. I’d challenged him, and he thought sleeping with me would put me in my place. Like coaxing a few moans from my lips while he glared dispassionately down at me would prove some kind of point.
If I’d been even a little less stubborn, I’d have walked away. I’d have known sleeping with someone to win an argument was off the charts of stupidity.
But… I wasn’t less stubborn. In fact, I was the kind of stubborn that had resulted in more than a few emergency room trips, like the time I put my tongue on the frozen basketball pole to prove it wouldn’t stick—it did. Or the time I just had to prove the lake wasn’t too thin to ice skate on—it was. Or even the time I claimed I could handle a raw ghost pepper—I couldn’t.
So I reached out and gripped his tie, tugging him a little closer. “Think you’ll win this, Mr. Suit?”
His lips curled up at the corners. “I know I will. Just like everyone who winds up across from you on the court probably does.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me.”
“I know you’re going to let me kiss you.”
I clenched my teeth. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but when he dipped his chin toward me, and I caught a hint of his manly musk—a scent somewhere between money and fresh cut wood, the words died on my lips.
God. Why was I so stubborn? Couldn’t I maybe stubbornly decide to prove I wasn’t stubborn, for once? Except all my thoughts felt powerless. I was swept up in him, and deep down, I knew there was no breaking free of this. He was the riptide, and the harder you fought the riptide, the more it had you. The only way out was to relax. Surrender to it and ride out the current until it finally tired of you and let you swim back to shore.
I’d lost the moment I walked into this, but I still wasn’t ready to accept that.
I tilted my chin up and let his lips crash down on mine. I wondered if he felt the same rush of white-hot excitement I did in that moment. It wasn’t an ordinary kiss. It wasn’t two people seeking affection. There was no hunger for approval.