Page 33 of Eye Candy

“Why are you doing this? Is it money?”

Her eyes dropped to her feet.

“You planned to extort Joe,” I answered my own question, feeling the truth of the words before I said them. “If you made a scandal big enough to give the trustees doubt, he’d pay you to go away. Or I would.”

She nodded. “That’s the gist, yes.”

“You do look like her. Teddy.”

“Yes.”

“It’s the?—”

“Chin,” we said at the same time.

Silence again.

“I have to go,” she said softly. “Lyssa, my roommate, will be waiting up for me.” She swung her bag over her arm and thrust one arm into a gaudy leopard-print coat.

Without her fake party-girl bluster she looked stressed. Tired. And I’d put that look on her face. Guilt clouded the edges of my better judgment, though I shouldn’t have been feeling guilty; she was the one trying to extort my brother.

I did though.

Floss exhaled as if she was on the brink of saying something, but her phone started buzzing again. Fuck Gerard, whoever he was.

She declined the call again, seemingly at a loss for what to do next.

I realized I’d probably never see her again.

She’d kissed me tonight like she wanted to merge her body with mine. She’d made me forget about my blog, my absent little brother, and all my principles. I’d been ready to slide my hands up her skirt and make her moan my name as she came around my fingers like the greedy brat she was, now she was just going to walk away.

“Wait—”

She gave a little shake of her head, and before slipping through Lueur’s doors into the New York night, she gave a small wave.

This woman knew the exact shape of my dick and had ground against it like she was trying to milk it through our clothing. She’d unlocked something in me, and I wasn’t going to forget it, I couldn’t, any more than I could let her disappear.

Simply waving goodbye was like trying to unroll dice.

CHAPTER 15

CAROLINE

In the middleof a con was a bad time to learn a critical truth: I was a good burlesque artist but a bad scammer.

Gerard should have held out for a more ruthless butt-chin doppelgänger.

Chaseknew.

Unfortunately, he knew the worst bits—I wasn’t Teddy Bircher and I was trying to make Joe look like an irresponsible frat boy in order to bring their family name into disrepute so Gerard could extort them. But he didn’t know that I’d bungled the job to flirt with him and ended up flirting for reals. He also didn’t know I’d basically flooded my underwear when he’d called me a brat and had been replaying our kiss in my head ever since. How dare Chase be a virtuous goody-two-shoesandhave a filthy mouth?

I couldn’t believe I’d thought Chase didn’t have range! I’d never met a single person with that much range. The man was a whole musical scale.

Kissing him was hard to find words for, or even process. It had been like watching a bartender put a light to some invisible spoton the bar and seeing flames blazing a path no one had known was there—and then hearing bachelorette parties screaming as they did flaming shots and I worried about my synthetic lashes catching fire.

That’s what kissing Chase felt like. If lashes were emotional resilience.

What a mess.

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