“Oh, God.” He groans. “It’s as bad as I thought, isn’t it?”
I blink rapidly and pull my gaze from his jaw to meet his eyes. “It’s worse.” I let out a nervous laugh. “Much worse. You’re handsome.”
Chapter 20
Max
Iscramble to my feet awkwardly, too aware of Holly’s gaze following my movements, cursing my damn leg, because the muscles spasm slightly when I put weight on it after sitting for so long.
“Don’t lie to me.”
I bark the words at her. I don’t mean to. But the pain spiking down my leg pisses me off. Even worse than the pain, I hate it when people lie to me to spare my feelings. Like I’m some kind of child who can’t take the truth.
I hate even more that Holly is lying to me. Because I’d thought better of her. Because I’d thought I could trust her. Because the thought of her coddling me like a child is repulsive.
I’m not a toddler.
I’m a man. Who just spent the past two hours being caressed by the most beautiful woman he’s ever met.
And, yeah, I know she wasn’t caressing me. I know she was just cutting my hair. Just shaving my neck. But my body didn’t seem to know that. My cock sure as hell didn’t.
Thank God she asked about my research, because the only thing that kept me from getting a raging hard-on was my attempts to condense years of research into a single conversation.
It’s the only thing allowing me to stand upright.
All this together—the pain, the hard-on, her total lack of awareness of me as a man, and the fact that she feels like she has to lie to me—the combination tips my mood from irritation into anger.
“Don’t ever fucking lie to me,” I say again. “I’m not a child. I don’t need to be coddled. I—”
“I’m not lying.” She shakes her head, giving another one of those hysterical-sounding laughs. “And you would see that if you would stop yelling long enough to look at yourself.”
“I—” I cut myself short.
Because I haven’t looked in the mirror yet. I went straight from looking at the ceiling to focusing on her. Partly because she is always the thing I want to look at in any room. But also out of habit.
In a room with mirrors, I usually look anywhere else.
I barely have to move to face a mirror. The man I see there is me, and somehow not at all what I expect.
My hair is short on the sides, but longer on top. The wavy mess I never know what to do with is somehow tamed and sculpted. With the scruff on my neck gone and the beard trimmed nearly out of existence, I look . . . handsome isn’t the word I would have picked. It’s too foreign a concept. But I don’t look frightening, either.
Beside me, Holly gives another laugh and this time she sounds amused instead of nervous. “Well, maybe scowl less.”
“I don’t scowl.” I turn away from the image of us standing side by side, because there’s something about it that unsettles me. She’s still tiny to my tall, but we look less ill-suited than we do in my mind.
“You’re scowling now.”
“I am not. This is just what I look like.”
“You are without a doubt the most argumentative man in the universe. No, not the most argumentative man. Person.”
“I am not.”
“Yes, you are. If I said the sky was blue, you would say—”
“The sky isn’t blue,” I say automatically. “It only appears blue because the density of Earth’s atmosphere happens to scatter more of the blue light.”
She raises her eyebrows but says nothing for a moment. Then notches them higher as if that makes her point.
