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“Oh, right. You never had my number.”
He put his hand out for my phone. “Unlock it for me, and I’ll put mine in. Then I’ll message myself so I have your number.”
I’d thought earlier that this would be far easier if we’d exchanged numbers. I pulled my new iPhone from my bag, unlocked it, and handed it to him.
He frowned down at it for a minute, plugging numbers into the phone, and then handed it back to me. “I’m under J.”
I smiled. “Thanks.” It was better that I didn’t have his full name in my phone in case my father decided to check it.
We fell silent for a moment.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” I blurted.
It seemed like the right thing to say, and I’d wanted to break the quiet. It hadn’t been that long since he’d been killed, and I’d have said the same thing to anyone who’d recently lost someone they loved.
He shook his head and glanced away. “I don’t want to talk about that. I especially don’t want to talk about it with you.”
“Why? Because I’m a Gilligan?” His lack of a response was enough to tell me I was right. “I didn’t have anything to do with his death, Jayden. You must know that. I’m not my family, and even if I was, you don’t know that they ordered his death.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. “I said I didn’t want to talk about it, Ivy.”
I needed to respect that, even though I wanted to plead my case. It didn’t seem fair that he’d blame me, at least in part, for something that had nothing to do with me.
To hide my awkwardness, I took a couple of swigs of my champagne. The alcohol had started to blur the edges of my mind, and I relaxed into it. I’d rather be slightly tipsy with him than sitting here feeling completely out of place.
Jayden knocked back the rest of his drink and then topped up our glasses. At least he wasn’t asking me to leave.
“How’s the head?” he asked.
I glanced down and self-consciously raised my fingers to the plaster. “Oh, it’s fine. A bit sore but not too bad.”
“Can I look?”
“There’s not much to see.”
He raised his eyebrows, and I knew he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I set down my glass and exhaled a breath.
He edged closer, so the side of his thigh pressed to mine. I was so conscious of his proximity, every nerve ending across my skin seemed to be alight.
“It can’t have been easy, going through what you did last night.” His fingers were still at my temple, his body impossibly close, his thigh burning against mine. “Plenty of people—women and men—would have lost their shit, but you were brave.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were, and when I patched you up, you didn’t complain. You were such a good girl.”
A flush of heat rushed through my body. My breath caught, and my nipples hardened beneath my top.
Jesus, fuck. What the hell was that?
A tingling flared between my thighs.
Hell, no. I was not going to be responding in that way to Jayden Wynter.
But longing filled me. “Say it again.”
He glanced down at me. “What?”
My voice was breathy, and I could barely believe I was saying this out loud, but my desire was stronger than my embarrassment. “Tell me I’m a good girl.”
