Page 81 of Text Appeal

He eases his fingers out of me and presses a kiss against my belly. My leg is carefully lifted from his shoulder, my foot stands back on firm ground. I dropped the skirt of my dress at some stage. It takes me a minute to open my eyes. To come back to reality. And there he is, still on his knees staring up at me.

“I love watching you come,” he says in a low voice.

My smile won’t sit still. Too many emotions are competing for dominance inside of me. The most overwhelming of which is what he’s doing to my heart. Upending my life and moving here was meant to be life-altering. But it was meeting him that changed things for me.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and asks, “How do you want to handle the breakup?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“Breakup?” I ask, clueless as can be.

He nods stiffly. “Ava’s done the job for us with that kiss. No one thinks we’re getting back together now. You and I can stop with the fake dating.”

“You want to discussourbreakup?”

“Yeah.”

All of the good feelings scatter. “Huh.”

Having dropped this bombshell, Connor gets to his feet and heads to the kitchen to grab a glass of water. He walks with his head down, those thick shoulders sitting higher than normal. As if he knows he might need some protection. It takes a minute for him to notice me watching. “What?” he asks, nonchalant as fuck.

“Did you seriously just give me break-up oral sex?”

He shrugs.

“You knew you wanted to bring an end to our agreement and yet you initiated intimacy with me anyway,” I say. “Doesn’t that seem sort of sketchy to you?”

“There’s no need for us to keep pretending we’re together and we agreed we were only hooking up temporarily, right?” he asks. “But I just…I wanted to thank you for today.”

“And oral sex says it better than a gift card, apparently.” My laughter is wholly lacking in humor. “Wow, Connor. You know, some people might be upset by that sort of thing. You springing this on me a full minute after making me come. But it’s okay. I see what you were trying to do.”

His smile is full of relief. The idiot.

I smooth down my dress. “You’re not concerned that if we breakup right now, people will think it’s because of that kiss? That you saw Ava moving on and this is just some last-ditch effort to get her back?”

“No,” he says. And that’s all he says.

“Do you want to maybe elaborate on that answer?”

Another shrug. No wonder he wouldn’t look at me earlier. There’s a lot going on in his eyes. So many emotions. He stands on the other side of the room to me with his arms crossed and his face set. To think, he was eating me like I was his last meal a moment ago. Now he can’t put enough distance between us.

“We could, ah, say we fought about something?” he suggests, pushing his hair back from his beautiful face.

“I don’t know if that would be believable. We’ve fought about several things and managed to work it out like adults.”

He frowns. “Well, if we’re fighting all the time, maybe we shouldn’t be together.”

“But we don’t fight all the time, do we?”

“You know what I mean.”

I don’t, but whatever. Time to stand tall and take the pain. It’s partially my own fault for getting carried away. For thinkinghis smiles and his honesty and the way he held me meant something. His acting skills have come a long way since we started. The man had me convinced today.

“Though this is all beside the point and you mean theoretically, of course,” I say. “Because we were never really together, right?”

“Right. It wasn’t real.”

“No.” I paste on a smile. “It’s not like us hooking up meant anything either.”

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