Page 76 of The Wake-Up Call

I humour her. I’d follow her anywhere these days—maybe I always would have. When I step into the lost-property room, I pause. There’s a trestle table set up in here, and an array of face paints on its surface.

“My skills are a little rusty. I need a subject to practise on ahead of the Christmas party,” she says, pointing to my desk chair, now positioned in the centre of the room.

She walks to the door and clicks it shut. The sound sends a shiver across my skin like the trail of a fingertip.

“Sit,” she says when I don’t.

“Did someone make this Izzy Day?” I ask, raising my eyebrows at her.

“Sit,please?” she tries, and this time I do as I’m told.

She dips a small, pointed brush into a rectangle of blue paint, moistens it with water, and dips again. I watch the way she frownswhen she concentrates, how she brushes her hair away from her eyes with the back of her hand. Everything about her is suddenly acutely fascinating.

I wonder when it happened. If there was one single tipping-point moment when I began to fall for her. Did I ever truly hate her? It seems unthinkable now.

Izzy touches the brush to my temple, stepping close enough to skim her thighs against my knees. The paint is cool—I flinch slightly, and she tuts, brush still moving, tickling against my skin. Dab, paint. Dab, paint. Each time she leans in towards me, I have to fight the temptation to look down her shirt.

“So,” I say as she works her way down the side of my jaw. “You have me at your mercy. What are you going to do with me?”

“I’m thinking a sort of Jack Frost vibe,” she says, but the quirk in the corner of her mouth tells me she knows what I mean.

The next time she returns to me with the paint, she stands even closer. Heat unfurls along my spine, and on impulse I shift my knees to trap her leg between mine. She breathes in sharply, brush stilling on my cheek. I give in and let my gaze flick to that triangle of pale skin where her shirt falls open at the neck. I can see the edge of a white lace bra, and the soft curve of her breast.

I shouldn’t have looked. That has not made this easier.

“Have you changed your mind, then?” she asks, twisting away to reach the paint but keeping her thigh between my knees. “About tonight?”

The brush whispers against my cheekbone. Izzy licks her bottom lip. I could have her in my lap in half a second. I want to. She knows I want to.

“No. I’ve not changed my mind. Have you?”

“I told you my decision was made.”

I incline my head in acknowledgement as she moves away totop up her brush. This time, as she turns back to me, she presses a thumb under my chin and forces my head up, then to the side, baring my throat. She takes the brush to the sensitive skin beneath my ear and I inhale, closing my eyes. She’s not even touching me and this is turning my blood to fire.

“You could have had me in your bed last night,” she says. “One message.”

I knew that. I felt it for every slow minute of the evening.

“You really do have ironclad self-control, don’t you?”

She has no idea.

“I want to know what happens when you let go,” she whispers, leaning in. “I want to make you lose your fucking mind.”

Pelo amor de Deus.My heart is pounding.

“All done,” she says brightly, pulling back, her thigh slipping from between my knees. “Want to see?”

I open my eyes. She’s looking down on me with an infuriatingly familiar expression: the self-satisfied smile she wears when she’s beaten me at something.

She holds a small make-up mirror out for me to see myself. I have no idea what I’m going to find—it could be reindeer, or snowmen, or possiblyLucas is a dickwritten on my jawline. But it’s amazing. A tumble of white and blue snowflakes running from my right temple to the left side of my neck.

“It’s good,” I say. “Now can I do it for you?”

“You? Paint my face?”

“Mm-hmm.”

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