The Americano exploded on impact. The lid flew off, iced coffee drenching the back of whoever I’d just body-checked.
Momentum carried me forward, completely off balance now, and my hands shot out on instinct, grabbing the stranger’s shoulders because the ground was coming up fast and I was not about to eat concrete in front of three hundred people on a Saturday morning.
He tried to twist free. Jerked away from me, actually, like my hands burned him.
I gripped tighter. Because gravity was winning and my survival instincts didn’t care about personal space.
The momentum did the rest. He turned. I lurched forward. And my face smashed directly into his.
Lips against lips.
For one absolutely deranged second, I was kissing a stranger in the middle of the Wynwood Farmers Market. Not intentionally. Not romantically. More like two people collidingat the exact wrong angle while one of them was covered in iced coffee and the other was trying very hard to peel a strange woman off his body.
His hand shot out for balance and landed somewhere it should not have landed.
Specifically, my chest.
His palm, right there. Grasping.
My brain did the math in about half a second and came up with: this man is touching your boob in public and you are still holding onto him like a koala.
We both froze. Him with his hand on my chest. Me with my fingers still digging into his shoulders. Our faces an inch apart, my coffee dripping off his chin.
His eyes dropped to where his hand was. Then snapped back up to my face. The horror in his expression was so pure, so absolute, that in any other circumstance I might have laughed.
Then we scrambled apart like we’d both touched a live wire.
I stared at him. He stared at me.
He was striking. That was the first coherent thought my brain managed to produce after the chaos.
Tall, very tall, with dark hair kept neat and precise, not a strand out of place. Gray eyes behind sleek rectangular glasses. A jaw that could've been drawn with a ruler. Unhelpfully beautiful, every single one of his features.
He looked like someone who'd never spilled anything in his life, and I had just baptized him with an Americano. The fabric of his linen shirt clung to his chest, soaked through, and my brain chose that exact moment to stop being useful.
He looked down at himself. Then at the coffee cup on the ground. Then at me. His expression cycled through emotions at a speed I couldn’t keep up with.
Shock. Disgust. Horror. More disgust.
And then a fury so cold and controlled it made the steak man from the diner look like a toddler having a tantrum.
He opened his mouth.
What came out, in a voice with a British edge sharp enough to cut, was:
"Bloody hell."
CHAPTER 2
Anna
"Bloody hell."
My first thought was that I misheard him. My second thought was that nobody sounds like that in real life. The accent was mostly American but sharpened with something British, like the Queen’s English got mugged by Miami and they were still negotiating custody.
"I am so sorry," I started, because that seemed like the right thing to say when you’ve crashed into a stranger, kissed him against his will, and let him accidentally grab your chest all within the span of a few seconds. "I didn’t see you, and someone bumped into me, and the coffee just… it went everywhere, and I’m really, genuinely sorry about your shirt."
He wasn’t listening.
