Page 19 of Kiss Me Tonight

“Fuck me.”

At her hushed whisper, I jerk my eyes away from her mouth like I’ve been caught with my hand inching toward the proverbial cookie jar. “What did you say?”

Her hand drops away from her shirt to point an accusing finger at me. “No.”

It’s all she says.No. And yet that one syllable rocks my entire world.

Because if she’s here at London High, dressed like that, at seven in the fucking morning on a Monday, there’s only one conclusion to be made here and we both know what it is:

“Levi.”

Blue eyes, the color of San Francisco Bay at sunrise—so deep a shade they almost don’t appear blue at all—blink back at me, her throat working hard with a swallow. “You know my name.”

I rest a hand against the still-warm grill of my Ford 1-50. “I didn’t then.”

We both know what “then” I’m referring to.

“You let me think you were someone else.”

And I enjoyed every second of stepping out of “Dominic DaSilva’s” size sixteen shoes. Enough that I wouldn’t change a single thing about the hour we spent talking at the pub, including the tense moment when we went from strangers to the intimately acquainted.

I’ve spent the last three days picturing her blond head buried in my lap.

Not that I’ll ever admit that out loud.

Grasping my old hat off the truck, I swipe it against the outside of my thigh. Then shoulder past her so I can check out how much damage we’re looking at here. “A slip of the tongue,” I tell her, fitting the ball cap on my head and squaring off the brim. “We’ll call it even.”

“Even?”

“Even,” I confirm smoothly. “You jacked up my car.”

“You let me call you an asshole and didn’t even have the decency to clue me in that I was making a complete fool of myself!”

“Are we talking about before or after you used my lap as a personal pillow?”

When silence greets me, I glance over my shoulder to see her miming strangulation. No need to question whose throat she’s envisioning caught between her slender hands. I flash her a shit-eating grin. She flashes me the bird. And then I hear a teenage voice shout, “No middle fingers, Ma! Your rules, not mine. Pizza’s on you tonight!”

Ma?

I duck down, one hand planted on her car’s roof, and spot a teenager lounging in the passenger’s seat. As though sensing my stare, his head swivels to the left. I watch his mouth move—“Oh, crap,” he mutters, I think—right before he throws open his door and scrambles out into the parking lot. He zips around the car, nearly careening into Levi, who cuts his stride short with a hand to his shoulder.

They’re the same height but look nothing alike.

The kid’s got dark hair flopping over his forehead like a wannabe Justin Bieber. He’s lanky across the chest, wiry down the arms, and his legs could pass for string beans.

Oh, the joys of teenage boyhood.

I remember growing like a weed, too.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Levi hisses to the kid, her hand still locked over his shoulder. “You moved to thepassenger’sseat?”

Her son has the good grace to dig his shoe into the gravel and look ten shades of apologetic when he mutters, “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I panicked, Ma. What if my permit got taken away? What if I couldn’t play football anymore? One minute I was sitting there with my hands on the wheel and then, before I knew it, I was crab-crawling over the shifty thing.”

“It’s not called a ‘shifty’ thing.” She throws up air quotes and I bite back a grin. Flustered is a good look on her—objectively speaking, of course. “And I can’t believe you . . .” She sucks in a sharp breath, and I’d have to be blind not to notice the way her ample chest lifts with the inhalation. “It’s bad to lie.”

Then she turns to me, no pointed fingers in sight. Not that they’re necessary when she’s already glaring murder in my direction.

Blue. Her eyes are most definitely blue.

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