Page 19 of Protégé King

His lips curve. “Yes, they will.” He sets his wine glass down, and then mine, before he eases against the cushion and pulls my legs across his lap.

I settle against the arm of the couch, which I’m only now realizing is some kind of soft tan leather that is warm. Maybe it’s actually velvet? Whatever the case, the entire apartment is money, especially the art on the walls. I’m a bit of an art connoisseur. It’s my favorite hobby, but not one that would benefit my family and their business.

“Did you decorate this place yourself?”

He laughs. “As if I’d decorate anything. Remember my room growing up?”

“Yes, I remember. Hot women were the only theme you knew.”

He laughs. “I was a young boy.”

“Oh, please. I bet your bedroom is still all about hot women.” It’s out before I can stop it. “Please do not reply to that and embarrass me.”

He laughs again, a deep, rumbly sound I feel in every part of me. “My parents own this place. They hired whoever they hire to decorate. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.”

“Which will be when?”

“I’m looking at places now.” He catches my foot and runs a thumb down my arch, and I don’t know why it’s sexy, but it’s sexy. And intimate.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I remember when you stepped on that toothpick right here.” He presses on my foot and massages.

I moan, because come on, it’s a foot massage, but at the same time, my mind travels to the past. We’d been seventeen. Actually, he was eighteen. It was only months before he left for college, and we’d been at his pool. “We” meaning us and his girlfriend. He’d forgotten her to help me, but how could he not have? The pain had been excruciating, and he’d helped me calm down enough to get help. “That was brutal,” I say, shivering. “I can hardly think about it going straight up into my foot without freaking out. You just… yanked it right out.”

“It was bad. I still don’t know how that toothpick got there. No one in our family used the damn things.”

“You always had friends over. I’m sure it was one of them.”

“My friends always hit on you, and you never dated even one of them.”

“As you already said, you were weird about me and other guys. Dating one of your friends didn’t seem like the way for us to stay friends.”

He scoots in closer, draping my legs fully over his body. One hand plants on the other side of me. He leans in, his face close to my face, his lips so very near. “I followed your rules.”

“I know,” I reply, and I do. That doesn’t mean I didn’t wish he wouldn’t.

“No more rules,” he declares, “not if they include you with everyone but me.”

I could read into that declaration, and therefore say so many things, but I don’t let myself do either. One thing I’ve learned is that men are different from women. Per one particular psychology instructor, at least where sex is concerned, men are about the moment. Women are about forever. He’s living in the moment.

I need to be sure I do the same.

Otherwise, I will end up hurt.

As if there is any other way this ends.

Chapter Thirteen

Alana

“No more rules, not if they include you with everyone but me.”

Everyone but him. That’s actually the truth. My world has been everyone but him, although somehow still all about him. Tonight, that changes, I decide. Tonight is about me, my pleasure. My desire. My obsession that must end because it’s unhealthy. Otherwise, it’s about him again. And three years without him proves it has to be about me.

I curl my fingers on his jaw, more confident now in what comes next, empowered to go where this night leads, and leave it at nothing more or less than old friends with a crush and sex. Just sex. “I’m here,” I whisper. “I knew what was going to happen when I came here.”

His mouth closes over mine and the next thing I know, I’m in his lap, straddling him, kissing him, drowning in him all over again. “I really can’t believe you said yes,” he murmurs, his hands sliding under the T-shirt, pulling it over my head.

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