Page 52 of The Thing About My Rival

But again, she makes no attempt to take it away from me.

I wrap my other palm around the back of it, and now I have a part of Wilcox completely in my grasp. “Because I want to.”

She looks at me again, the gold flecks in the green sparkling in the low light.

For the first time in my life, I could stand holding hands and taking in every detail of a woman’s face for hours and never get bored.

What the fuck has gotten into me? Wilcox, that’s what. Damn her for being so totally bloody irresistible.

“And you want to too, don’t you?” I draw her hand to my chest. “I think I know you well enough to know you would have snatched this hand away from me by now if you didn’t.”

“Do you really not remember anything about Paris?” Her voice is soft, almost breathy.

“I remember dancing with you. And thinking you were hot.” Probably best to leave out the bit about her boobs bouncing when she jumped up and down.

“And nothing else?”

I shake my head. “Will you tell me?”

She sighs, slowly slides her hand out from mine, and plays with the keys, as though that was the reason she needed it back.

My heart drops to my stomach. Have I lost the moment?

“Okay.” She digs her teeth into her plump lower lip, a hint of stubbornness back in her face, like she’s decided to tell me because she knows I won’t like it.

“We danced. To anAbbasong, then some Bee Geesthing, and…” She looks up at the embossed ceiling for a moment. “…something by Donna Summer, I think.”

“Wow. Granular. I hope you’re going to be this detailed about all of it.”

She turns her head so she can give me an oh-for-goodness-sake side-eye. It moves her face into the green light from behind the bar, which illuminates those three freckles on the tip of her nose. “Then we went to get a drink and stood at a bar table talking. But the whole place was loud, so we had to stand really close together.”

“How close?”

“A few inches.”

I step toward her. “Closer than this?”

Over her breasts, her sweatshirt rises and falls more deeply than before. “Yes.”

“Show me.”

She shakes her head and concentrates on the keys. “Don’t be silly.”

I hook my hand around her upper arm, the softness of the inside a contrast to the firmer muscle on the outside. “It’s not silly. I really want to know.”

She takes a long, slow breath, her chest quivering again as it swells.

I ease her arm toward me, and she follows, inching closer until there’s almost no space between us.

With one quick stroke of my thumb over her arm, I release it. “That’s pretty close.”

She nods, her attention focused somewhere around my ribs.

“Then what happened?”

Unable to play with the keys with both hands anymore because there isn’t enough space between us, she flips them over and over in one palm. “You kissed me.”

Those words could not turn me on more if she’d said them while getting to her knees in front of me.

---