Page 83 of Sugarlips
My heart pounded as I lifted my gaze and came face-to-face with Liam. How was it that a man I saw every day in various stages of undress—from naked to ripped jeans and an apron to now in this suit—could continuously take my breath away? I swear, each time I saw him, I was stunned with how gorgeous he was. It should be a crime to look as hot as Liam Evans.
“Breathe, Chloe,” he said, smiling, as he curved his hand into mine and hugged it against his chest.
How could I, with him so close?
With another disarming smile, the few couples on the dance floor with us faded away, blending into the low hum of the crowd around us.
I stopped dancing. Right there in the middle of all the swaying bodies, I halted, not caring who was watching.
My eyes slid to the bar where there was only one employee and boxes of champagne bottles unattended beside the bar. I grabbed his hand and tugged him off the dance floor. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“You ask too many questions. Take off your jacket and hand it to me.”
He stumbled as I tugged him back over to the bar, fumbling out of his suit jacket and handing it to me. “Chloe, what the hell—”
I spun a quick one-eighty to face him and pressed my index finger to his lips, whispering, “Do you remember our first kiss?”
His pupils dilated, the inky black widening against the moss green background. “Of course. You’d literally just ended things with Dan—”
“Not that kiss,” I interrupted him. “Ourfirstkiss. When we were in high school.”
He went silent for a breath before he answered. “Of course I remember it. Every second. I remember your hair was even blonder back then… and long. So long that it usually landed at the middle of your back. But that night, it was tied in high pigtails with blue and silver ribbons. You hadGo Catspainted in the school colors on your cheeks and you tasted like cherry vanilla Chapstick mixed with—”
“Champagne,” I finished his thought. “Because Elaina and I had stolen a few bottles from our parent’s cellar. We thought they’d never notice… we were wrong. And we were grounded for a month.”
“I didn’t know you got grounded for that.”
I shrugged, continuing with my thought. “I’d been watching you all year. I thought you were so cute, but always so serious. And at sixteen? I didn’t know what to make of that.”
His expression morphed into a grin. “You watched me all year? Why didn’t you ever talk to me… or, I don’t know, make a move.”
“I was a sixteen-year-old cheerleader. I was used to the guys always making the moves. Prior to you, I’d never had toworkto get a guy to kiss me.” And frankly, I’d never had to work for it after, either. Liam was the only guy who kept me at arm’s length.“But man, you made me work for it.” I laughed and Liam’s smile tugged higher. “I tried to find every reason in the world to walk by your locker that year. I even tried out for the fall musical because you had auditioned. All my cute flirting that usually worked so well on other guys, you ignored. You kept your nose buried in your books or kept talking to your friends, ignoring me completely.”
Liam snorted and rolled his eyes playfully. “Ignore Chloe Dyker? Hardly. More likely, I thought there was no way in hell you were really flirting with me.”
“Well, you were dead wrong.” I flipped his jacket over my arm, and as I approached the crate of champagne, I intentionally stumbled, dropping my clutch on purpose. He rushed to grab my elbow, his flirty smile quickly etching into a look of concern.
Until he saw that as I bent to retrieve my clutch, I slid a bottle of champagne out of the box and covered it fully with Liam’s jacket. “And that night at the homecoming game, I stole a bottle of champagne just for us.”
With a crook of my finger, I gestured for him to follow me as I weaved through the crowd out to the balcony. “I had every intention of seducing you that night.” The night air was chilly—that was summer in New England for you—and there was only one person out there with us who quickly stubbed out his cigarette and went back into the party.
I handed Liam back his jacket, but instead of putting it back on, he slid it around my shoulders. With a squeal, I popped the cork off the champagne, then wrapped my lips around the bottle, taking a swig of the fizzy liquid spilling out over top.
“You cornered me at the after party in the woods behind the football field,” he said, his eyes bright.
“First, I lured you away from the rest of the people at the party,” I said and noted the way he glanced at where we were; once again, lured away from the crowd. Like a coyote, I knew how to capture my prey. I held the bottle up to his lips to drink, just like I did that night all those years ago. “Then I convinced you to try the champagne. You weren’t much of a drinker, but I remembered that you were always reading gourmet cookbooks and I thought I could win you over with an expensive bottle. Especially if I seemed like I knew something about it.”
His grin widened. “You told me, ‘This champagne runs $60 a bottle.’ Which for us back then was an insane amount of money. For God’s sake, we could’ve bought a video game with that kind of money.”
“Back then?” I snorted. “Hell, that’s a lot of money for champagnenow.”
“And you told me that it was the perfect champagne to pair with a pungent cheese, such as limburger or camembert. Except, I think you pronounced it camem-bert, with a hard‘T’at the end.”
“All I knew was that I was desperate for you to think as highly of me as I thought of you. You made me want to be smarter and stronger and more poised. And that night, after we made out, I wanted to call yousobadly.”
His inhale was sharp and he brushed a finger across my cheek. “Then why did I see you kissing someone else the next week at school?”
