Page 63 of The Ex Factor

“Damn, it is cold!” he said with his teeth chattering as he stepped out beside me.

It was, but I was enjoying it. Sujit stuck his hands in his coat pocket, waiting patiently while I soaked in the beauty around me. My body trembled slightly as I closed my eyes and put my hands out, allowing my senses to take in the soft snow drifting over me.

“Have you played in the snow before?” he asked.

“Once,” I said with my eyes still closed.

Suddenly, something soft hit my arm. Taken by surprise, I looked at Sujit, who stood without his glasses, tossing a snowball in his hand.

“Did you just pelt me with a snowball?” I asked, my voice screeching with incredulity.

Sujit smirked. “I did.” He tossed the ball in his hand again. “What are you going to do about it?” he asked in a challenge.

I gasped at the dare, then frowned at his audacity before digging both my hands into the mound to grab snow for a big ball.

“You just made a big mistake, mister,” I said. “You forgot how much I hate to lose.”

The gloves I had on weren’t meant for snow play, and I could feel the cold seeping in. But I didn’t care. I flung a hurriedly packed ball at him. With a weak thump, it hit his chest and disintegrated into powder against it.

“Is that the best you can do?” he teased, and I frowned more. He was pushing all the right buttons, and he knew it. “Let me show you how it’s done,” he said. “Catch!”

I did. The tightly packed, solid ball did not break in my hand.

“And that’s how you make a snowball, sweet girl.”

I hurled the ball back at him, but he ducked, and it landed in the snow, making a nice, deep crater.

“Well, well, Ms. Bhatia, looks like you are terrible at this,” he said, adding fuel to the fire.

When I turned around to gather snow, a soft ball landed on my back while a firmer one smacked my butt with some force. I jumped with a squeal.

“Oh, you’re in trouble, Sujit Rao. You want war? You got war,” I announced with misplaced confidence.

“Let me see it,” he said and tossed the ball in his hand.

The reason behind his arrogant smirk was the three snowballs that lay at his feet, ready to be launched into an assault as needed. In the time it had taken for me to gather enough snow to make one, he had made four, including the one in his hand currently. With quick calculations, I realized that this was his game, and I couldn’t beat him at it. But nowhere in the snow-pelting war manual did it say that I couldn’t change the rules.

Or the game itself.

Shunting off the lousy ball in my hand, I sprinted toward him. Before he could react, he was on his back in the snow with me on top of him.

Hmm, maybe I hadn’t thought it through enough.

I lay on him, pelvis-to-pelvis, stomach-to-stomach. Our chests were separated by the sheer strength of my core muscles because there was nothing I could use to lift myself up. The snow gathered around us, sinking us deeper into it.

“You think that’s going to deter me?” he said softly. This kind of proximity to him was disorienting.

Lost in the depth of those warm eyes without the glasses, I failed to notice that his arms at my side were moving. Before I knew it, I felt a cold trickle on my neck. The villain had put snow on the exposed part of the neck. I shrieked, squirmed, andshifted, but he was quicker. Locking me between his thighs, he pulled his arms around me and flipped us over. I lay under him, with my back buried against the snow.

Fuck!If he could do that in the snow, I didn’t even want to imagine what he could do if we found ourselves in bed together.

He pulled himself up on his knees, his legs holding me tight. His fingers swiftly came around my wrists to pin me down completely.

“You were saying…” He smirked, but I had forgotten how to breathe.

The world froze into stillness. I lay under his spell, mesmerized by his beauty, captivated by the dent in his cheeks as he teased me. My body was turning numb from the cold, but I felt his warmth against the heat rising below my belly.

The wind had picked up, casting the loose snow flying all around us. The world seemed to fade away, and it was just me and him. No judgmental eyes, no heartache, no exes. Just Sujit and me wrapped in a warm blanket of mutual admiration and love.

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