I’m angry, but there’s something else—this warm buzz of familiarity as he nears.
People head away, leaving us standing there, an island in the ballroom. “Ready?” Max says.
“I get it—you’re in charge, not me. You really had to change the whole game to prove it?”
“You think that’s why I changed the game? To prove a point about who’s in charge?”
I raise my brows. A yes.
He tips his head near mine. Lowers his voice. “I couldn’t let you go out there with him.”
Butterflies swirl in my belly. “Why? Why’d you have to do that?”
He comes nearer. “Because I couldn’t let you walk out of this ballroom with him. It’s not about control.”
“Why would you do it?”
People are coming up. Max is a magnet for people. “Let’s get out of here,” he says.
I narrow my eyes.
“Humor me.” His tone is serious, like this is really something.
I grab my coat and we head to the elevator. His touch on the small of my back seems to radiate across my body.
We wait with a crowd of rowdy partygoers and get in. People are talking to him, jokingly trying to get him to give clues. A few of them have bottles of champagne, and the mood is jolly.
He says that he didn’t create the game. “We’re all on equal footing,” he insists.
It’s not the elevator he got me off in, but it’s the same décor. I give him the side eye, but he not joking around.
Eventually we all spill out onto the sidewalk in front of Maximillion Plaza. It’s a magical night; snow falls in thick, lazy flakes, dramatic as a snow globe, frosting the dirty horizontal surfaces in sparkling white. The air is warm-ish, almost balmy, and the traffic sounds are subdued.
Max shakes a few hands and poses for a few selfies and then people rush off.
“So…do we have a clue to follow or something?”
Max looks up and down the street. More people are shouting to him. Waving. He waves. The partygoers want a piece of him, or at least a selfie. “I need to tell you something and…” Somebody else waves. “Come on.” He takes my hand.
We cross at a lull in the traffic and duck around the side of the Maximillion studio building—the one that used to be some kind of industrial building, the one he visits every day. He punches in a code and pulls open a door.
In we walk. The door shuts, sealing us away from the din of Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. It’s spacious inside, with just the lights of the city pouring in through the high arched windows, making glowing squares on the wood floors.
He locks the door and fixes me with a serious look. “We have to talk.”
More laughter sounds from out there. Somebody knocks at the door. “Max?”
“Christ,” he says.
“Your party just won’t quit,” I whisper.
He scowls. There’s something achingly real about him. He feels genuine; raw, even. No liquor carts in sight. “Come on.” He leads me across a giant expanse of moonlit floor past hushed workspaces.
“This game has taken a mighty strange turn,” I say nervously. “Are the enemies of yore to retreat?”
“I’m done with the games.”
We end up in an interior space lit by skylights from above. A lounge for workers, maybe.
He sets me down on a chair and bends over me, hands on the armrests. His brows are furrowed, eyes without the ironic twinkle. “I need you to know something. I didn’t arrange the Meow Squad deliveries. I didn’t have anything to do with them. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Wait, what?”
“I know you thought I did. I don’t blame you for thinking that. But yeah, it was Parker.”
“Parker?” I say. “I thought…”
“He only just told me back there at the party. I couldn’t believe it. Making you be my delivery person like that?”
“I totally thought you did.”
“Mia.” One word. My name. Mia. The low rumble of it pulls at something inside me. And I’m so acutely aware of us alone in this space, and of the dominating way he looms above me.
“Actually, I thought you’d engineered it,” he says with a half smile.
“In what universe do I engineer that? In what universe is doing lunch deliveries in a cat suit a good plan of vengeance against a rival? You have no idea how much I hate this uniform. Like, hate it. As evil master plans go? D minus.”
“You were driving me crazy. I could barely concentrate on anything, just waiting for those deliveries.” He kneels in front of my chair. “Your deliveries were destroying me, Mia.”
He’s saying some more words, but his head is in the zone of my lap, now, and it’s hard to concentrate. I imagine my lap lined with lights, like an airport runway, highlighting the forward route his face needs to travel in order to land in the safety and comfort of my pussy.
My breath quickens. He’s talking more. Something about the sandwiches.
But then he pauses. His grip on the chair arms changes as his eyes skate over me. “I don’t like how it happened. I don’t want any bullshit between us like before.” High school, he means.
“Let’s not think about that,” I say.
“We need to.”
My hormones are little luggage trucks, driving in furious circles, beep-beep-beeping excitedly. “Do we, though? Right this minute?”
His eyes go dark, and I’m stunned anew by how beautiful he is. “I didn’t bring you here to fuck,” he growls.
I have this sense that it’s not me he’s growling at—it’s more like he’s growling at the part of himself that wants to fuck. The really primal and base animal part that might grab my hair like a motherfucking lion.
“And yet…” I whisper.
“Fuck, Mia.” Again his eyes rake up and down me, and suddenly his hands are heavy on my thighs, all harsh gravity through the delicate silk of my dress.
I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
My sex heats, a glowing landing beacon, and I settle my hands onto his, slipping my fingers suggestively under his shirt cuffs. I meet his feral gaze with a sassy little smile.