Page 74 of My Irresistible Enemy

Ineeded to move. I’d come upstairs to give him his sweater. I needed to toss it at him and walk away. Needed to put as much distance between myself and him as possible before I did something I regretted.

I stepped inside the room, closing the door softly behind me. Aiden’s brow furrowed, but he didn’t object.

“I don’t know. Do you ever lock doors?”

I set his sweater down on the corner of the dresser closest to me.

“I didn’t think I had to. I don’t exactly expect people to come barging into my hotel room.”

He still didn’t seem mad, though. More curious, than anything.

Leave,urged a little voice in the back of my mind.Leave before you do something stupid.

“And I don’t expect to walk in on people masturbating every time I turn a corner,” I said. Against all odds, I found myself smiling.

This was dangerous. Aiden was a flirt. He’d never been serious about a single thing in his life. He was the worst kind of guy for me to get mixed up with, even if it was just physical.

But I didn’t leave. Instead, I watched his face, the way it flashed from annoyance to exasperation to amusement, each expression so vivid and alive. He’d never learned to conceal his emotions. Never needed to.

“I wasn’tmasturbating,” he said after a moment.

“Oh? What word would you use to describe a guy fingering himself, alone in his bedroom?”

I couldn’t help it—my eyes dipped lower. He was still hard, and he hadn’t made any effort to conceal it. Unfortunately, Aiden noticed me looking and snickered.

“Like what you see?” he asked, and laughed even harder when I didn’t respond. “Okay, fine. Technically, I was masturbating. But I wasn’t just doing it for the hell of it.”

What was that supposed to mean?

Aiden looked over at the dresser. I thought he was looking at the sweater I’d delivered, until I saw his phone. His phone, which was propped up against a tissue box, facing the bed. Recording.

“I was doing it for an audience.”

My stomach dropped through the floor.

“Fuck,” I whispered. An errant detail swam back to the surface of my mind. I’d barely noticed it at the time, but evidently, it had lodged itself in my brain. “You had your phone out on the boat too. In the bathroom. You were recording yourself there too, weren’t you?”

Aiden’s cheeks went pink, but the look he gave me was pure challenge. “Is there a problem with that?”

“There is if you have a fucking boyfriend you’re sending those videos to,” I snapped. “I slept with you. You didn’t think to tell me that?”

“Boyfriend? What the hell are you—”

“You said you were single. I heard you. On camera, the first day, you said it. Does he even know what we’re doing, the way we’re—fuck, even if he does know, you still should have told me. You ever think that maybe I wouldn’t want to—”

“Nolan, calm down.” Aiden was moving off the bed, walking towards me. I backed up until I hit the door. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“You don’t?” I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t sure I was thinking clearly. It was hard, with Aiden this near. This near and this naked.

“I don’t.” He was so close we were practically touching. “I promise. That’s not who the videos are for.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. He’d admitted he was making videos. That he had anaudience, as he’d put it. What else could he have meant? Aiden growled in the back of his throat.

“You’d think I’d be used to that look from you by now,” he said. “You’re glaring at me, the sun rises in the east, what else is new? You don’t have any right to judge me, you know.”

“I’m not judging you,” I said, still struggling to pull my thoughts together. They were spinning like a pinwheel. “I’m just not sure I believe you.”

“Well, that sounds like a you problem.” He cocked his head to the side. “Anyway, you don’t have to be so dramatic about it. You didn’tsleepwith me—something that you felt was very important to convey to me the night of the festival, by the way. You jerked me offone time.”

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