“And if I don’t?”
“If you don’t, I’ll…” Her furious reply trailed off, replaced with a sigh and something much softer spoken: “No one can know, okay? If my father knew, he’d flip. With everything else going on, I don’t want to add this to it.”
I could understand that. Still, I couldn’t just drop it and pretend she and I didn’t have a connection. “I’m not going to advertise our… excursions in the Playground, but I can’t forget them, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want to meet you in the Playground again,” I told her honestly, “only this time, I want you to be the one handcuffed to the bed. Both hands.” I lowered my voice to a bare whisper, adding, “I want to drown you in so much pleasure you won’t be able to walk afterward. And then maybe I’ll abandon you there like you did me—” I watched her expression morph from one of annoyance to one of hidden lust, and then back to annoyance, and I chuckled, in spite of it all.
“You are an ass.”
“And you are everything I should hate, and yet I can’t seem to stop thinking about you, princess.” I was measured in lifting a hand to her face, running a finger down along her jawline. When that finger reached her chin, I forced her face to turn to me once more. She breathed unevenly, as did I.
“How long have you known it was me?” she asked. Giselle didn’t pull her face away from mine, which was a little surprising. Maybe I was getting to her. Maybe she had finally come to the same conclusion as me: she couldn’t fight, couldn’t deny the connection between us. To do so would be futile.
“I had a suspicion the first time, but… let’s just say I wasn’t really thinking too much with my upper head that night.” When I said that, Giselle smiled—and it was a genuine, real smile that made this whole thing worth it. She was so much prettier when she smiled; I wished she would do it more. “You have such a beautiful smile, Giselle.”
“I thought I was too young for you,” she whispered, lifting a single brow. Her gaze had focused on my own lips, and I wondered if she would be okay if I kissed her. If I closed the remaining distance between us and tasted her again, this time without masks hiding half our faces.
We were alone up here. Everyone else was downstairs, and that included Luca and Zander. I had Giselle as alone as I could possibly have her, and that made all kinds of thoughts race through my head.
“You are,” I agreed, my finger slowly moving up from her chin, dancing across her lower lip. And she was. She was too young for me, more than ten years my junior. She was a child, but… but she wasn’t. Giselle might be young, but she acted so much older. If I had to guess, I’d say circumstances in her life had forced her to grow up faster.
“Then why do you look like you want to kiss me?”
The answer to that was simple, too: “Because I do.” And then I did something I probably shouldn’t have: I kissed her. I angled her face toward mine and brought my lips to hers, tasting the sweetness that was Giselle Santos once more.
This kiss was much more hesitant than the ones we’d shared in the Playground. Her lips were just as soft, though, just as mesmerizing. Gentle. Tender, almost.
And over far too quickly, because Giselle jerked her head away from mine, eyes wide. She gave me a look that said she didn’t know how to process any of it, a deer in headlights kind of expression. She wanted to run. She was used to running. I didn’t know exactly what happened in her past, but I knew enough; she wasn’t used to mutual desire. She didn’t know how to deal with it, so she wanted to do the only thing she could, and that was run.
But she was in this booth with me. If she was at full strength, she could punch me in the stomach, wind me, and scoot away from me, all the way to the other side of the booth. But doing so would only cause her stomach to hurt, so she was basically trapped, unable to escape.
Which meant she was mine.
“We don’t have to be in the Playground for you to let go,” I murmured, unable to resist the urge. I wanted to kiss her again, so I did. The fingers holding her chin went to the back of her head, bringing those beautiful lips to mine once more. And this time? This time she kissed me back. This time the hunger she showed through the kiss reminded me of the Giselle I’d met in the Playground.
She wanted me. She wanted me just as much as I wanted her.
I couldn’t say how long we kissed, and it didn’t matter. Nothing at all mattered in this world, not right now, not while I had Giselle here with me. The truth was out, and it had gone better than I’d expected.
I didn’t want the moment to end, but I knew it would. And, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, perhaps ending this kiss before I lost all control of myself would be for the best. My cock ached with a deep, carnal need, and I knew it would not find its way in between Giselle’s legs tonight.
We were both out of breath by the time we broke the kiss, and Giselle was the first to speak, “This can’t… we can’t do this. I can’t do this.” My hand fell away from the back of her head, and as I leaned away from her, I watched her bring a gloved hand to her mouth.
“Why?”
Those beautiful dark eyes fixated on me, and her hand dropped to her lap. “There’s… there’s so much you don’t know. So much you can’t know, so don’t ask. I can’t—” She shook her head, her blond hair bouncing as she did so. “We just can’t, okay?”
“I don’t accept that.”
Giselle clearly wasn’t expecting that answer from me, for she blinked a few times, her mouth falling open. “You… you can’t not accept it. That’s just how it is.” She sounded so certain of that; she probably wasn’t used to people arguing with her, especially men.
I shrugged. “You can’t tell me what to do, princess. I don’t accept that.” She opened her mouth, seconds from saying something else, but I plowed on, “Does this have anything to do with whatever you and Luca were talking about?”
“What do you know about that?”
“Nothing. You two just looked awfully cozy together over there.” I ground my teeth at the memory. “And Luca mentioned whatever it was about involved the two of you. Now, I don’t know about you, princess, but there are only a few possibilities I can think of that would involve business between the two of you.”