But Adam didn’t seem to hear me as he stepped even closer, trapped against the door and the porch railing.
“Frankie,” he crooned. “You don’t need to play hard to get.”
His lips landed on mine, prodding and insistent. I felt like I was being mauled by a rubber chicken.
I pulled away, repulsed. This was more than wrong. This was horrifying.
“Adam, no.” I put my hands on his chest, trying to push him away. “I’m really not—”
“Come on, Frankie,” Adam continued, pressing his mouth up and down my ear with all the energy of a wet stamp. “You’ve been giving me fuck-me eyes all night. You can’t expect me to take anything less than a kiss. Give me something here.”
Fuck-me eyes? Was he serious? I had barely paid attention to the man all evening.
“Adam, seriously. Please stop.”
“We don’t need to play games,” he cooed, his lips pulling over the edge of my jaw like one of my kids’ rubber erasers.
But before I could answer, the door opened. I stumbled backward, out of Adam’s insistent arms and into a quivering wall of muscle.
Adam and I both turned to find Xavier looming in the entry, staring at us both with a face full of murder. Even with his white shirt wrinkled and untucked, feet shoeless, hair mussed from lying on the couch, he was ten times the specimen of the other man standing beside me. With his arms crossed like that, every line of his biceps, his tattooed forearm, and even his shoulders were cast in high relief through the white cotton; buttons pulled across the wide expanse of chest. With the posture of a warrior and the sharpness of a chief, he was the very definition of what my nonna would have affectionately dubbed “a real man.”
A real man who wanted to tear the other one apart.
There was no recognition in his blue eyes as he looked Adam over. Only cool acknowledgment of someone he clearly regarded as no better than a bug on his shoe. And fire. The dark blue kind at the center of a flame. The kind that can burn anything it wants.
“Good night?” he asked but didn’t wait for an answer before turning to me. “Your daughter needs you.”
Without waiting for an answer, he took me by the wrist and yanked me inside, behind his big body and completely out of Adam’s reach.
“Good ni—” Adam started to say just before Xavier slammed the door in his face.
“Fuck off,” he snarled over his shoulder.
And then he turned that fire on to me.