Page 10 of Rejected
“Jo, I couldn’t control myself,” Laurie turned serious again. His gaze was back to being hungry,desperate. “Looking at you, your face, your…” he swallowed—nearly choked.
“My what?”
“Your hair. Jo,” he reached out a hand to brush away a strand from her forehead, and his fingers were trembling, his breath coming short. What was wrong with the boy? Was he sickening? “You have no idea how beautiful you are. The things you do to me.”
He closed his eyes and the color left his cheeks, as if he were in pain.
“Torture,” he murmured to himself. “Not touching you is torture. Not… kissing you.”
“Don’t say that as if you’ve thought of it before.”
“I have thought of little else,” Laurie whispered. Jo just gaped at him, trying to wrap her mind around what he was saying. All this time? He had been thinking of… kissing her?Her?
Traitor.
“Don’t look at my lips,” he said, sounding dazed.
Jo startled. She hadn’t realized she was looking at them.
She couldn’t look away.
A slight breeze rustled the leaves of the rose bushes behind her, and their fragrance swirled around them in the purple night. A sudden flush travelled up her neck and reached her cheeks. Suddenly, she was so hot all over, she felt dizzy.
“Don’t look at my lips,” Laurie repeated, but it wasn’t her Laurie. It was this new Laurie, who spoke as if every word was a struggle, whose voice was a low, masculine rumble, whose eyes were devouringher whole, whose lips were pink and luscious and… “Unless you want to snap the merethreadof control upon which I am barely hanging.” His eyes flashed.
She had never seen him like this. His expression was positively wolfish.
“Then what will happen?” Jo asked breathlessly.
“I will go crazy, well, crazier than I already am. But I won’t kiss you.” Laurie pressed his lips together—had they always been so bite-worthy?—and a vein popped on his forehead. “Not until you beg—” She gasped, and that seemed to jolt him back to his senses a little bit. “Not if you don’t want me to,” he amended quickly.
“Nobody asked you to,” she murmured.
But her brain was thinking something different altogether.
I might want to kiss you, it was thinking.It had never occurred to me before tonight, but now that it has… I can think of little else.
I could kiss you.
I wouldn’t beg, but I would like to…
I could kiss you.
It’s the marrying part I object to.
The world toppled around her.
She got so dizzy, she could barely keep her seat.
Did I just think I could kiss Theodore Augustus Laurence? No, did I justwishI could kiss him? That is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
Mortified, she was mortified.
She did not even dare look at him.
“Well, I won’t,” Laurie was whispering. Whispering, in that husky, new voice, that made all her bones tingle.Stop it, she thought maddeningly at him.Stop doing things to me.
“Why not?” she asked, hardly knowing what she said.
