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“You know nothing.” Leo glared furiously at her and stepped in her direction.
Piper took a step back into the bookshelf on the back wall. Never one to back down, she reached out her other hand and jabbed her pointer finger into his chest. “You probably barely draw out the tension before you’re trying to get into a girl’s pants.” His eyes dropped to where her finger was wrinkling his black Henley before he stepped toward her again, caging her with his body against the shelves. “I think you.” Poke. “Should take lessons from me.” Poke. “Mr. Director.” Poke.
Leo had become so pissed off and fed up with her assessment that he snatched up her wrists and pinned them against the shelf above her head. One of his hands was big enough to wrap around both her wrists, and where he didn’t have a good enough grip, the shelf and the textbooks gave him leverage. His entire body was pressed into Piper. Each hot breath that mingled in the air between them had her breasts pressing into him, and his cock surged in his pants at the feeling of it. Piper didn’t struggle to break free, just hit him with her searing ocean eyes, the pure hatred behind them somehow making it harder to conceal the growing problem in his pants. They didn’t say anything for what felt like forever, just panted in a furious stalemate before Leo finally broke the silence.
“I can show you if you’re so desperate to know for yourself, Piper.” Leo’s voice came out hoarse as his eyes flicked across her face, cataloging every feature to memory.
“You wouldn’t dare,” she seethed, but she was stubborn enough to press her chest into him another inch.
“Don’t test me. If you tell me to show you, I will.” He dropped his gaze to her lips and back up to her eyes to make his point perfectly clear.
“I think you’d chicken out.” Piper’s hot breath danced just below his mouth, and he could feel her quickened pulse in her wrists.
“Try me,” Leo urged. He was so sure she was going to say no. She had to because her lips were a fraction of an inch away from his, and he had imagined how they would taste one too many times for this staredown to end anywhere good.
“Do it.” It came out as a whisper, but he heard it perfectly. Fuck.
“Fine.” His self-control splintered. One arm still pinning her wrists above her, Leo jerked forward and met Piper’s lips with his mouth, breathing her lemon cake scent in through his nose. With one hard, demanding kiss, there was no mistaking exactly where his thoughts went when it came to the curve of her ass or what he wanted to do when her nipples were pointing at him in the cold outside the karaoke bar. He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t attracted to her anymore. The proof that he could easily lay her down right there on the floor and ruin her if she wanted him to was in the kiss. The desire that coursed through his veins rivaled his anger.
There was no reaction from Piper for a second, and Leo was just about to pull back in horror—because what the actual fuck was he thinking?—when she moved. It wasn’t slow like how she had implied she would want it earlier. She pressed into him and warred with his mouth, her tongue slipping past the seam of his lips and dragging in a rough swipe along his bottom lip.
Leo was gone. There was no return from this. And it seemed whatever invisible cord there was between them had finally snapped—no, burned—for her, too. The hand he wasn’t restraining her wrists with found her waist, his fingertips digging into her with an all-consuming want. A soft noise of pleasure left Piper’s throat and vibrated against his mouth before her teeth bit into the pillow of his lip. His cock hardened against his zipper, straining to press into her. It would go down in infamy as the worst decision he ever made, but his body refused to stop. Despite how reckless and stupid it was, it felt like everything was aflame and would burn him alive if he didn’t get more. Everything inside him would be satiated as soon as he got more.
At some point, Leo relaxed his grip on her wrists. One of Piper’s hands gripped the fabric of his shirt to pull him closer, and his now freed-up fingers found the back of her head, lacing into her hair and pressing into her scalp to slant harder over her lips. Nothing was enough. He licked into her mouth, and her tongue met his with fervor. The hand gripping her waist slid up her side and found her breast, cupping her through the fabric of her dress. It was exactly how he thought it would be, firm, warm, and everything. He could only stop devouring her lips long enough to trail wet, sucking kisses up the column of her throat. Piper bucked her hips into his groin and hitched her leg over his hip.
Leo groaned. “Me vuelves loco.”
Their lips slowed.
Speaking at all was the wrong move, or the right one, depending on how Leo was looking at it. Declaring how crazy turned on he was was too much. They could have pretended before that this was inevitable, but the second the words left his hungry mouth, it brought them crashing back to reality enough to jerk apart with mutual alarm.
Piper’s eyes were wide and alert as she pressed her palm over her mouth with the hand she just had fisted in his shirt. Leo took a giant step back, his mouth hanging open. Whatever the hell that was, the sobering reality of his surroundings was a hard slap to his face. Anyone could have walked in on them grinding against each other like two people who didn’t claim to despise one another. Maybe someone had seen them. It wasn’t as if hiding in a row of bookshelves were very discreet.
Unable to meet Piper’s stare for longer than it took to see the sheer shock on her face, Leo backed up, tripping over his shoes. He quickly escaped to the end of the bookshelves but stopped just before he was out of sight to look back over his shoulder. Piper was a statue and looked like she would stay there forever unless he said something, so he let his self-indulgent side have the floor again for one statement. “I guess now you know.”
In the time it took him to get to the exit, Leo’s self-beratement ranged from a simple “chingada madre” to “What the hell is wrong with you? Pinche pendejo.” Beyond all the insults he could hurl at himself, there was still a devil on his shoulder who wondered what it would feel like to have Piper naked and moaning his name if just kissing her felt that good. The small gasping sounds she had made against his mouth played on a loop in his head like his own personal Groundhog Day hell, a broken record that felt equally destructive and like a perfect harmony. A symphony in the orchestra pit nailing the crescendo of a song while a perfect voice on stage hit every note of the performance with ease and grace. Piper’s voice.
Seventeen
PIPER
Obnoxious crunching noises echoed in Piper’s living room as her brother Carter sat on her couch eating what was left of a bag of barbecue chips while smiling ridiculously at his phone. Piper was both thrilled that her brother was so sickeningly happy and annoyed by the same thing. This was the first time she had seen him in two months even though they went to the same college. Despite wanting her brother to find love, she didn’t want him to disappear on her completely because of it. There was always some excuse as to why he couldn’t come over to her place or travel back to Archwood with her. The only difference today was that his girlfriend had canceled on him in favor of other plans. Piper was always second fiddle when it came to Stella, but she didn’t care. She would take what she could get.
“I see how it is. You came over just to eat everything in my pantry?” Piper scolded.
“I didn’t eat the kale chips.” Carter grinned.
“Wow, thank you so much for being so considerate.”
“And I’ll try to be around more! I just—”
“Yeah, yeah. I get it.” She waved him off and plopped down on the couch next to him, shoving one of his broad shoulders.
“And how are your romantic prospects? Anyone remotely good enough for our Perfect Piper?”Carter’s eyebrows rose.
Piper groaned. “God, you know I hate it when you call me that.” She sidestepped his question entirely considering her only romantic entanglement of late was with Leo Diaz, of all people, in a library, where she had practically dry-humped him against a bookshelf. One more minute alone with him, and who knew what egregious mistakes she would have made? Even in the aftermath, she could not stop thinking about the kiss. The way it felt like Leo had fucked her with all her clothes on.
“That’s why I do it. It’s my job to annoy you.” Carter cut through Piper’s sexual fantasies, effectively dousing her in ice water. And then, because little brothers were disgusting, he started to lick the barbecue residue off his fingers.
