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Deciding to concede this particular theatre of war, he held his hands up placatingly. “I’ll just have to pay more attention to the subtle differences, I guess.”
“Or spend less time enthralled by my chest,” Victoria said, having decided that she wouldn’t allow him to withdraw from the battlefield gracefully. Far from it. Instead, she’d dropped a battalion of paratroops at his rear, who now cut off his escape route. She wanted to turn this into a slaughter.
As rapidly as if he really was in such a dire situation, a skeletal hand of panic clutched his heart. Floundering, stammering, and face as scarlet as a stop sign, he was as diffident in that moment as he’d ever been. On the other skew of things, poised to obliterate his faltering defenses, Victoria instead spared him.
“You can relax,” she said, amusement shimmering subtly within her eyes. “I’m not scolding you for it.”
His face burned vermillion. If someone had hosed him down, steam would have erupted off his body.
“Still,” he said, fumbling for the right words. “I feel like it’s a bad look. So, I’m sorry.”
“It’s a normal look—tolook,” she assured him. “There’s a difference between looking and leering, and I know the difference. I have a hundred or more examples of both types, and everything in between, every semester.”
“I don’t know if that makes me feel any better,” he admitted. “I think I’d have preferred it if youdidglare at me over this.”
“If I did, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. We’ve already identified that you can’t tell what is and what is not my glaring face.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, eyes locked—very intentionally—with hers. He sure as hell wouldn’t let them deviate now or ever again. Okay… no. Even as he made that silent oath, he knew he’d end up breaking it. He’d never been built for celibacy. Certainly not now, addicted as he was to the experiences that he’d shared with Tess and Avril.
“I would suggest that you be careful about where your eyes wander once Avril arrives,” Victoria said.
Confusion, and a shard of anxiety, knit together his eyebrows. “Avril? Not Anna?”
“Avril,” Victoria confirmed. “Neither Anna, Tess, nor I will expect you to keep your eyes locked straight ahead for the whole evening. Even if we did want that level of restraint from you, it would be ridiculous for us to have those expectations. When you look, and we both know it iswhenyou look, it’s Avril who will torment you if she notices. You should remember that because of what she tried to get you to do last weekend.”
She almost certainly addressed the ranking of the four women Avril had tried to coax out of him at their card night. There was a non-zero chance she would bring it up again… or something along those lines. And so, Victoria’s words rang true.
“I’m not exactly known for being sly,” Liam admitted. “Case in point, this conversation.”
“No, you’re pretty open about where your attention is pointed,” Victoria agreed, giving him renewed reasons to feel heat burgeon in his face. “The exception being when you have a deck of cards in your hand. For how effortlessly you tricked us all there, it’s a curious juxtaposition of personality.”
“I guess I’m only Hyde when I’m playing cards,” he said, shrugging.
“For the best. Because Ididwant to glare at you after you revealed how you’d taken advantage of us so easily.”
“Well, the cat’s out of the bag, so I doubt I could pull it off like that again. Not that I’d want to. I like playing cards normally. It was just that one instance where I wanted to…”
“Show off?” Victoria offered, lifting an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he admitted, which resulted in another opportunity to see Victoria’s slender smile. It renewed his desire to see if he could cause it to curve just a little bit higher before it vanished again. “After all, it’s not every day you get to do something like that in front of four stunning women.”
“Perhaps not,” the most voluptuous of those four beauties said. “Then again, you’re about to have a Christmas party with all four of them less than a week later, so your luck has yet held.”
And one week later is New Year’s Eve,Liam thought, realizing that there’d be a third such opportunity forthcoming. If Avril remained good to her word, tonight was when she would reveal what she was scheming for that day.
“I hope it keeps holding,” he said. “This is way better than spending winter break on my own.”
“Yes, I had noticed that,” Victoria said, diverting her attention toward the room around them. “Are your parents away?”
“They’re in Denmark.”
That wasn’t quite enough of an answer for her. At her behest, he spent the next few minutes explaining his family situation.
“I see,” she said after he completed his explanation. For several moments, Victoria didn’t say anything more than that. During that time, a fog settled over the paleness of her eyes, and her expression nominally softened. For her, it was a drastic change.
Before she broke the unusual silence, she nodded toward the gifts that were still due for transport to Tess’s living room. Gingerly, they collected them, with Liam remaining ginger when it came to holding Tess’s gift.
“We’ve tarried a bit,” the gorgeous but solemn woman said. “Let’s drop these off and see if Tess needs anything from us before Avril and Anna arrive.”
