AllFreeNovel
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“What are you doing, Audrey?”
“I thought I was being pretty clear,” I say, edging even closer to him, flush against his body.
Even extended to my full height, I have to tug Noah down to meet me. The milliseconds it takes for his mouth to reach mine are just enough time for a wave of panic to spike my blood.
Holy crap. What have I—
But then his lips touch mine and the floor bottoms out from underneath me. My eyes flutter closed. Gentle and tempting, he doesn’t claim my mouth like a hungry brute. He’s calculated and cunning and annoyingly good at this.
I’m kissing my enemy, and more importantly, he’s kissing me back. One hand tightens on my arm and the other is tangled in my hair now, tilting my head, angling me perfectly so he can part my lips and further this experiment. How far do you want to take this, he taunts.
I’m losing track of my objective.
Destroy Noah? Or was it something else? Something better. Sweeter. Hotter.
My hand grips his hair and he feeds me a moan.
His lips tempt me toward insanity. An innocent kiss turns into something more.
His hands have moved lower. One is tight on my waist, keeping me flush against him. The other toys with the bottom of my dress. His knuckle brushes against the bare skin of my upper thigh and my entire body clenches with want. This is indecent, even for a crowded bar. Someone should pry us apart and scold us, but either nobody notices or nobody cares.
As the kiss deepens and Noah’s tongue touches mine, I’m drawn more and more into him. It feels a little like I’m sinking into quicksand. I feel totally helpless. Defenseless. At his mercy. If he wanted to back me up, haul me on top of the bar counter, and continue this madness, I’d let him. I’d surrender, totally.
And that’s when clarity stabs through me like a sharp knife.
I break the kiss and shove him away.
I’ve made such a huge mistake. I wasn’t really going to kiss him. I was going to toy with him and then be done with it. But Noah didn’t let it end there. He played dirty. He dug down to the very root of me and took a little nugget of truth he can tuck into the front pocket of his shirt and draw out whenever he feels like taunting me.
“God. You’re a jerk,” I hiss.
He looks like I just slapped him. “What?”
“How dare you…do that! Do you honestly have no moral compass at all?”
I’m already trying to shoulder my way through the crowd, but he tugs me back.
“What the hell are you talking about? You came on to me.”
We’re both spitting venom, and when I try to yank my arm free of his hold, he releases it like he just got burned.
“Yeah, and then you crossed the line,” I accuse. “I wasn’t really going to kiss you!”
I’ve never seen him look like this before. Furious, yes, but it’s more complicated than that. If I didn’t know better, I’d misread his crestfallen expression for real hurt.
But that’s all part of it too, isn’t it? He can’t laugh and admit his wrongdoing now.
He’s still in the game.
He just kissed me like I was his lifeblood. He made me believe it in my soul, just for that one perfect second.
I can imagine him breaking character and coming clean. Sinister glee twisting his features into something wicked. But those eyes don’t change. That hurt, however fleeting, doesn’t turn into triumph. It turns into exhaustion.
“Tell the others I’m heading back to the school,” he says before turning and weaving his way through the crowd toward the front door, never once looking back.
I’m mad at him for leaving before I could. I don’t want the task of returning to our table to mop up the mess we’ve just created.
My stomach growls as if to say, Hi! Crap timing, I know, ha ha, but you do remember that you still need to feed me, right?
But I’m not ordering anything here.
I have a mission, and once I complete it, I’m gone.
I figure there are two scenarios I’ll find when I make it back to the table. Either Lorenzo and Gabriella saw Noah and me kissing and are deeply confused and possibly upset with us, or they just want some food and they’ll be deeply confused and possibly upset with us once they find out we didn’t actually order anything in all that time we were away.
Oddly enough, when I spot them in the crowd, they aren’t drumming their fingers on the table, making awkward conversation in our absence. Gabriella scooted into my seat on the bench and has her head tilted toward Lorenzo. He’s talking and she’s laughing and from the looks of it, they’re really hitting it off. She says something he must like because he reaches out and touches her hand. Then he doesn’t take it away.
