Page 77 of Read My Lips

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

TUESDAY

Light streaked in through the gap in Simon’s curtains in an unnecessarily bright shaft, tractor-beaming me out of unconsciousness. Birdsong wafted in through the window a thousand decibels too loud. I squinted at the world, stubbornly refusing to admit being awake.

Through the blur of my eyelashes, Simon’s colour-saturated walls thrummed deep indigo blue. In lamplight they’d seemed rich and dark, not migraine-inducingly vibrant.

Fuck me.

Oh, wait. Task already accomplished. Both physically and mentally. So, what happened next when the guy you were fake dating in order to protect from being fired turned out to be confusingly invested?

No clinging to the edge of the bed to keep an inch of space between us this time.

“Morning,” I whispered, lips right up against his ear.

Simon grunted, rolling me back into focal distance with a hand to my chest. “Still need to see your mouth move, you bastard.”

“Didn’t want to wake you.”

He fluttered an eyeroll, flicking me an uncoordinated sign that made me laugh. “Bullshit.”

He wasn’t wrong.

“I’ll get the coffee on,” I signed. “My turn.”

Simon’s pyjama pants looked absolutely nothing like anything I identified as sleepwear. And, strolling across his kitchen towards me, citrussey smelling and newly shaved, he had fuck-all else on.

Large stylised big cats – leopards maybe – prowled along the dark teal silky fabric slung sinfully low on his hips, winding their way up around his leg-day-all-day thighs and diagonally down across his groin. Foxes sat bolt upright in between them – all narrow-eyed and suspicious, loudly judging all the blood in my body rapidly redistributing itself in a flood of wilful optimism as if everything we’d got up to last night wasn’t already enough. I swear to god my pupils dilated.

My mouth creaked open. No words came out.

Christ on a bike. I’d shred the damn things off him with my teeth if he came any closer. Which would be a crime, it really would.

“Is it giving you trouble?”

“What?”

The end of the world could have come before I remembered he even owned a coffee machine. I squinted at the overly-complicated barista-level contraption, trying to get it to do something other than flash warning lights at me in disappointment. The cup I’d shoved under the spout remained embarrassingly empty. I was probably irreparably damaging the thing jabbing buttons.

“I– erm…”

Simon leaned in, pressing cool silk against my hairy thigh. My lungs seized as he tugged the lever I’d apparently been failing to line up.

“The filter gets clogged sometimes, and you have to⁠—”

An incomprehensible caveman sound squeezed itself out of my throat.

Simon’s eyebrow hitched, brimful of wicked amusement. His understated abs rippled as he squared to face me. A light trail of tightly curled hairs extended down from his belly button signposting the direction of a prize that wasn’t – technically – mine. Even if he had been up for a second go last night, and everything this morning felt easier than it had any right to be.

I swiped imaginary dribble from my stubbly chin.

“Ben?”

“Sorry. You’re... These are…” My ability to sentence disintegrated in real time. I flapped a hand at him without a hint of language in it.

“The height of chic?” Simon supplied, stepping close, arms caging me in against the worktop. “Fashion defined.”