Playing It Safe

CHAPTER NINETEEN


It’s 7:17 p.m., and as much as the nap did wonders for me and I feel completely rejuvenated, I slept until just after six o’clock, leaving me about an hour to get ready. Thank God I had already taken a shower today, which ended up helping to save me some time. Well, two showers, but who’s counting.

I switch off the blow-dryer and put it down amongst the clutter on the counter before performing a thorough final inspection of myself in the mirror.

Word to the wise, ladies: always perform the final inspection. The one time I didn’t, I ended up with my tits on display because I had an extra button undone on my blouse. Of course it wasn’t until my date kept staring at my chest with a lascivious grin that I looked down and noticed it. Needless to say, it was our one and only date.

After a lengthy debate with myself over whether to show too much leg or not, I opted for showing them off tonight. I settled on a simple black shift dress with a plunging split neckline and dolman sleeves that end somewhere along my upper thigh. I paired it with strappy leopard-print high heels. My hair is pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and the only accessory I’ve added is gold hoop earrings. To the untrained eye it looks like I’m not wearing any makeup, but in fact I’m wearing enough to make it look like I’m not, which takes years of practice to perfect.

Overall I’m extremely pleased with how I turned out, given the fact that I only had an hour to get ready. I turn around and crane my neck over my shoulder to take one last look at my backside in the mirror. Once I’ve ensured that there is no back fat or panty lines visible, I switch off the bathroom light and head into the living room to wait for Alex.

First, I take to sitting on the couch but quickly decide that it may wrinkle my dress. Next, I try the barstools by the kitchen island and sit comfortably for all of a minute before my leg, kicking back and forth like an impatient child’s, drives me crazy and I jump off the seat. I start to pace back and forth behind the couch, but I stop when I realize my pits are starting to perspire again. So I freeze in mid-step and crane my arms up to let them air dry. I probably look like Daniel-san in The Karate Kid standing in the middle of my living room when I hear a light knock on the front door.

My heart hammers in my chest, and my stomach does a flip-flop while my adrenaline skyrockets. All because he’s on the other side of that door.

It’s only Alex. You’ve known him for years. You’ve seen him naked now, so calm down and stop being such a spaz.

I snap out of my awkward stance and approach the door. As he starts lightly knocking again, I fling it open, and my mouth drops open in shock.

Because it’s not Alex. Nope, it’s a*shole extraordinaire, Aiden.

Before I can say anything because my head is flying in all sorts of different directions, one of which is that Alex will be here any minute, Aiden steps forward and goes to kiss me hello on the cheek.


When he gets within an inch of me, I take a step back. “What are you doing?”

“I was trying to say hello,” he says.

“I get that. I don’t necessarily understand it, but I get that’s what you were just trying to do.” My hands clench into fists at my sides, trying to control the raw anger raging inside of me at the sight of him. “What I meant was what are you doing here at my house?”

Instead of answering me, he takes a second to look me over from head to toe. His head tilts to the side before he licks his lips when he’s done with his perusal of me. “You look amazing, Julia. Better than ever.”

“Answer me, Aiden.”

He takes a step forward so that he’s now officially standing inside my house. I’m almost surprised the jerk doesn’t burst into flames and collapse into a pile of ashes when he crosses the threshold, given the amount of hexes I’ve put on him over the years. What makes it so much worse is that he looks sinfully good wearing distressed blue jeans that hang low on his hips and a snug white T-shirt that showcases his muscular arms, allowing me a sneak peek at the tribal tattoo around his right bicep.

“You didn’t return my phone call,” he says, taking yet another step forward.

I answer by taking a step backward.

“So I figured I’d come by to see you instead.”

He gives me a cocky look like I should be grateful that he decided to grace me with his presence.

“See and that’s where you figured wrong. When someone doesn’t return your phone call, it’s the polite way of saying they don’t want to talk to you. But you’re too f*cking stupid to realize when I’m trying to be polite, so I’ll say it in a way that you can understand.” I put my hands on my hips and lean forward until I’m as close as I can afford to be around him without wanting to do bodily harm. “Stay the hell away from me. Don’t call me, don’t write me, and don’t ever show your face here again. If you do, I’ll pick up the phone and call your fiancée faster than you can say, ‘I’m an a*shole.’”

Aiden chuckles and rubs his jaw with his hand. “Now that’s the Julia I’ve missed so much. I knew she was in there somewhere.”

“Aiden, just stop it already. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That’s not true. I’ve missed you.” He pauses and tries his best to look sincere. On him it looks more like the devil trying to pass as an angel. Yes, it’s sexy as hell, but I’m not falling for it.

“Seeing you the other day has made me think about things,” he says.

“Wait a second. Maybe I have wax buildup in my ears or I’m losing my f*cking mind, but did you just say you’ve missed me?” I ask incredulously.

He tries to reach for my hand, but I take a couple more steps away from him. “You know what? Don’t even answer that because I don’t give a shit. You left me, and now you’re engaged. End of story. So I’d like for you to leave right now because no one here is buying the bullshit you’re selling today.”

“I’m not leaving until you give me a chance to explain,” he says.

Through clenched teeth, I say, “Please. Leave. Now.”

He doesn’t budge. In fact, he crosses his arms and leans against the wall in the foyer as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

And this is when the shit officially hits the fan.

“By my count, the lady has already asked you to leave twice.” Alex’s assured and scary calm voice comes from the direction of the door. Aiden and I both look in that direction to find him with his hands in his jeans pockets, leaning against the frame. “That’s one more than necessary, don’t you think?”

Aiden looks back at me with his lips fighting a grin, and then he looks back at Alex. “Don’t I know you?”

Alex casually starts walking toward me, completely ignoring Aiden. My heart is in my throat when he comes to stand beside me and wraps his arm possessively around my waist, pulling me into his side, blatantly letting Aiden know that he’s here for me. He couldn’t have made it more obvious if he would have pissed at my feet like a dog marking its territory. I’m usually not one for displays of ownership by a man where testosterone starts flying everywhere, but for some crazy reason, what Alex just did makes me so incredibly happy that I find myself moving farther into his warmth.

“Doesn’t matter if I know you or not,” Alex says tersely. “Julia asked you to leave. Not once, but twice. But you’re still standing here. My suggestion is you turn around right now and go home.”

Aiden’s eyes roam over us in our semi-embrace, and he chuckles as he turns around and starts walking toward the door. Just before he walks outside, he cranes his neck over his shoulder and says, “Julia, I’ll be in touch.”

Alex’s hand tightens on my waist as if he’s trying to keep himself in check. Quite honestly, I’m more shocked at Aiden’s performance than Alex’s. Seriously, what an a*shole! But the performance is still not enough that I can’t say one more thing before he leaves.

“Don’t bother, Aiden.”

“Close the door behind you while you’re at it,” Alex adds with a dimpled smile.

Once the door snaps shut behind him, I exhale a shaky breath in the hopes that it will regulate my sanity and temper. Now I’m left with having to explain the situation to Alex, who did nothing wrong but show up for a date and walked in on a disaster in the making. I turn in his arms and look up at him. He’s still smiling from ear to ear.

“Now I have a good reason not to like him,” he says. “When I met him at the engagement party the other night, I thought he was a dick, but this just cements it.”

“Alex, I had no idea he was going to show up here,” I say.

“You don’t need to explain. I heard everything.”

“Don’t you want to know—”

“No, I don’t, Julia.” Alex’s hand comes up and cups my face softly. “As far as I’m concerned, the guy has already taken enough of our time tonight, so let’s forget about him and let me take you out to dinner.”

I grin with pleasure and relief, not only at what he just said, but at being so close to him again too. And now that I have a moment to appreciate him in all his splendid glory, my eyes make a path from the tiniest hint of tanned flesh visible at his neck and collar, to his black dress shoes, and then back up again where a lazy smile spreads across his face.

“Let’s start over, shall we?” he asks. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“You look beautiful, Julia.”

“So do you.”

“Are you ready?” he asks, while taking his turn at looking me over from head to toe.

“I just need to get my keys and purse.”

I reach for both things on the foyer side table. When I turn around and try to take one step to start walking toward the door, he grabs my wrist.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

I scrunch my eyes while I think of what I could have forgotten. “Um, no. I have everything I need.”

Alex pulls me to him until I collide with his hard chest, and I put my hands out to brace myself. He cups the back of my neck while his other hand snakes around my waist, vanquishing what little space was left between us. When his lips touch mine, at first it’s a flutter of soft and light kisses as if we were becoming reacquainted. But it switches gears, and when I feel his tongue graze across my bottom lip, I lose myself to the kiss and to him. I grip onto the lapels of his jacket, and a soft moan escapes my throat, which encourages him further. He deepens the kiss but never once lets his hands wander.


I don’t know how long we stand there kissing, but when we break it off, we are both gasping for breath and our foreheads are resting on each other’s.

“Much better,” he says, his voice softer now as he caresses my cheek. “I’ve been thinking about doing that since you left me this morning.”

“You mean when I left you this afternoon.”

He tries to hide the smirk on his face, but the dimples give him away. “I stand corrected. I’ve been thinking of doing that since you left me this afternoon.”

Cupping my face with his hands, he presses a silky kiss to my already swollen lips that has me wanting so much more and has me quickly forgetting about dinner if we stay here any longer.

“Alex?”

“Julia?”

I keep my eyes closed as his mouth moves meticulously over to my neck, where he lavishes it with more kisses. “If you keep doing that, I’m not going to want dinner at all.”

I feel his smile against my skin, and then he stops and picks his head up to look at me. “I did promise you dinner, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

He answers by dropping his hands from my face and taking one of mine in his. After I lock the door, we walk to his car parked in my driveway, the whole time feeling oddly at ease and relaxed given the altercation with Aiden. But I’m not going to let him ruin my night at all. As of this moment tonight, I will not waste one more thought on him.

Alex opens my door for me and helps me in, then strides around the front of the car to his side. He gracefully slides in next to me before starting the car.

I turn in my seat to look at him as the dashboard illuminates his strong jaw and makes the blue of his eyes have an almost ethereal quality to them. Oh dear … I’m waxing poetic to myself about his eyes. Can you believe this? My thoughts sound as if they are straight out of a f*cking script for General Hospital. But I can’t help myself. He really is breathtakingly gorgeous, and I’m at a loss for words around him sometimes. And that’s how I know I’m elbow-deep in some shit I have no idea how to navigate through.

I always have something to say. Always. I basically can’t keep my mouth shut, ever. Men don’t make me stumble to find my words. Men don’t make me anxious. And men certainly don’t leave me wanting more.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“It’s a surprise.”

“I hate surprises, Alex.”

“No you don’t. Everyone says they hate surprises, but they secretly love them.”

“Well, not this girl,” I say defiantly.

With a smile in his voice he says, “Is this what it’s going to be like all the time with us?”

“And what exactly does that mean?” I ask, crossing my arms and trying not to analyze his use of the word “us” in that question.

“I mean,” he says, then pauses to steal a glance in my direction, “are you going to fight me every step of the way?”

Ever so smoothly, he puts his hand on the exposed skin of my thigh. The contact immediately garners a zing-like jolt from every nerve ending in my body. He starts to rub small circles against the skin with his thumb, and he adds almost as an afterthought, “Because I love proving you wrong.”

“I don’t fight you every step of the way. Am I not sitting in your car right now on my way to dinner with you?”

“Yes, you are. But if it was up to me, you would have been sitting in that seat a long time ago.”

See, that right there—when he says stuff like that to me, I’m left feeling like a complete idiot. How long has he been interested in me? Besides the flirting, there really was no indication that he had been waiting to make a move on me. Or was there? And I like to think of myself as having a modicum of intelligence, but now I’m starting to question if I’m as clueless as Sarah.

“Why didn’t you do something about it sooner?”

He doesn’t even hesitate with his answer. “You weren’t ready.”

“I wasn’t ready?” I say back to him in disbelief. “You’re a cocky bastard, you know that?”

Alex suddenly turns right onto a side street and parks the car.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he unlatches his seat belt, leans over the center console, and grabs my face in his hands. His mouth is on mine before I can utter a single sound or protest. At first I’m in shock, but I quickly get over it. That might be due to the precise forcefulness of his lips and tongue, which makes me want to surrender myself to him every goddamn time. I’m like putty in his hands, and he knows it. And not for nothing, but that kind of turns me on.

He slows things down, and all I can do is follow suit, because at this point, I literally feel like I’m just along for the ride. When I open my eyes, his are staring right back at me, full of lust and something else that I don’t want to acknowledge … yet.

“Now that I have your attention,” he whispers, “I’ll say it again. You weren’t ready. Does that make me a cocky bastard? Maybe. Do you think I give a shit that you think that? No. The truth is that you wouldn’t have believed me if I told you. You would have thought I was just looking for a piece of ass and blown me off.”

“But—”

“I wasn’t finished,” he says, cutting me off. “I have wanted to be more than … whatever we are for a while. And before your mind goes off the deep end, no I do not mean just f*ck buddies.”

“You make me nervous,” I blurt out of nowhere.

Alex’s lips curve upward with a small grin at my admission. “Why?”

“Because I never know what’s going to come out of your mouth, that’s why. Perfect example, what you just finished telling me. Who says that kind of shit? No one, that’s who. But you, you …”

“Me, what?” he asks, now with a full smile on his face.

“You say something like that and it throws me off my game. It’s infuriating.”

“I like throwing you off your game,” he admits quietly. “But what you don’t get, Julia, is that you have the same exact effect on me.”

“I do?”

He pulls my chin up and presses a light kiss to my lips. “You have no idea.”

Oh, I like that. I like that a lot.

And like any red-blooded female out there who finds out this kind of information, I try to use it to my advantage. First though, I have to sweeten the pot, so I lean forward and loosely wrap my arms around his neck. I run my nose along his, secretly hoping that I don’t get any snot on it before ducking my lips to his ear.

“Alex?” I say, barely above a whisper.

“Hmmm?”

“Where are we going to dinner?”

He chuckles as he pulls away and latches his seat belt again. “I told you, it’s a surprise. Nice try though.”

“I hate surprises,” I mumble under my breath when he starts to drive again.

I have to look out the passenger window to hide the grin on my face while he’s still laughing. It has a lot to do with everything he’s admitted to me a few moments before. But if you promise to keep a secret, I’ll tell you the real reason for it.

The cocky bastard was right. I love surprises.