“I didn’t know our history was a problem.”
“It’s not. It is.” I hang my head and draw in a deep breath before meeting his eyes and holding my hands up. “I call a truce.”
“A truce?” His eyebrows lift. “I wasn’t aware that we were fighting.”
“We’re not . . . it’s just . . .”
“It’s just that you still want me, and this is your way to justify why you’re angry at yourself for depriving yourself of me.”
“It’s not always about you,” I bark, frustrated before I regroup. “We have a habit of falling right back into what we were—”
“Just the once.”
“It’s the only other time we’ve seen each other since high school,” I say. Just the once. “This has to remain professional. I have a job to do.”
He nods with humor alight in his eyes that only serves to frustrate me more. “So there will be no wearing you down? No pressing you against the wall and kissing you breathless? No seeing if you still like being kissed on that spot on the inside of your thigh? No getting to know the current Bristol Matthews? No nothing?” he asks while I shift my feet. “Just a simple truce.”
“Yes. A working relationship where we mutually benefit each other.”
He snickers.
“Professionally,” I warn despite my mind flashing back to that night we were together. “I need to give my boss an update.” He just continues to stare and smirk as if he knows where my thoughts are, so I turn and study the gold records lining the walls because they’re easier to look at than him. “How the writing is going? If you’re having any trouble or have any requests for Will and Jasmine? If you’ve seen the rough cuts of the Heart of Mine video and have any feedback?”
“I love it when you’re all business.”
“I’m all business because it’s my job to be.”
“Do you know what this reminds me of?”
“No clue.” I read the names on the placards of each record. A pop princess. A Latin superstar. A boy band who’s endured.
“Tutoring. Your freshman year. My sophomore. I could care less—”
“Couldn’t care less.” I chuckle. “Clearly I didn’t do a good job tutoring you.”
“No, you did, but like I told you, when was I ever going to know the periodic table or the correct use of past participle or whatever it’s called? It’s just that I was more distracted by my pretty, strait-laced tutor. She sat there every day trying to help a kid who couldn’t focus because he was too busy trying to figure out how to get her to notice him.”
His words cause a smile to spread on my lips he can’t see.
“I never charged my computer so I was forced to sit next to you and use yours. I may have flunked a few tests on purpose so I had to keep seeing you. I might even have driven you crazy playing a beat on the table with my hands so you’d be forced to reach over and grab my wrists to stop me.” He laughs. “And that touch might have made this sixteen-year-old hard as a rock under the table where we were sitting together.”
The memories are bittersweet. The fact that he remembers them even more so. And despite all that has happened, they were such good ones.
“Then one day over The Catcher in the Rye—”
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” I correct.
“I leaned over and kissed you.” His last words are whispered in my ear from behind. The warmth of his breath tickles my cheek. I have to actively restrain myself from leaning back against him as the good memories assault me.
I stay focused on the gold records in front of me. A rock icon. A jazz singer.
“We were good together, Shug. What happened to us?”
“You left. Remember?” I try to keep my voice light, unaffected, but I’m anything but.
A hip-hop artist.
“No, not after high school. I mean the last time.” He puts a hand on my hip. His guitar-roughened fingers tickle ever so gently as they rest on the strip of skin between my top and leggings. The heat of his body is at my back.
Focus, Bristol. Get the answers McMann wants. Leave promptly. Save yourself the heartache that is Vince.
“How’d we let that escape us? How’d we walk away from us?”
“I wasn’t aware there ever was an us?”
A rock band named Bent. A picture of the four of them—Hawkin, Vince, Rocket, and Gizmo—beside the platinum record in the frame.
Remember how bad he hurts.
“Why’d you leave the band?” I ask, grasping at straws, at my sanity, from giving in to his seductive voice and the feelings I can’t erase.
His hand tenses on my stomach. It’s brief, but I feel it. “Why do I make you nervous?”
“You don’t. And I asked you a question.”
“I do, and I asked you first, but you’re avoiding this discussion. It seems that’s something you’ve mastered.”
“Hey—” But when I spin around to face him, to argue, I flinch, because now we’re face-to-face and well within each other’s personal spaces.
Kiss me.
The minute the thought hits my mind, I take a huge step back as if to chastise myself. Vince reaches out to prevent me from falling against the wall. I immediately shrug out of his grasp.
“Don’t touch me.” It’s my only line of defense—and it doesn’t work because his hands are back on my biceps and his mouth is inches from my lips. “What are you doing?” I ask when he doesn’t move.
“I’m letting you get used to the idea that I’m going to kiss you. It’s inevitable, isn’t it?” He leans forward and brushes his lips ever so slightly against mine. It’s the faintest of touches, but there’s beauty in its simplicity. Tenderness that is so unexpected from a man who is all or nothing. An undercurrent in both of our unsteady breaths that follows it. A burning through my body to want more, to take more, to have more.
“I can’t—we can’t do this,” I manage to get out. My mind races a million miles an hour while my feet don’t want to move. “We called a truce. We agreed—”
“You called it. I didn’t agree to shit.” He reaches out and tucks an errant piece of hair behind my ear. “You always were addictive, Bristol, and that’s a bad thing for a man with an addictive personality like mine. One taste is never fucking enough.”
Take a step back.
“It’s going to have to be.” My jaw is clenched. My resolve is front and center. Truce. Truce. Truce. Dodge. Divert. Deflect. “Why’d you leave Bent?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Vince
“Fine.” I let a slow smile crawl on my lips. Truce, my ass. She wants me. It’s plain as fucking day.
So much for my resolve to keep my hands to myself, but fuck if it isn’t hard when she’s dressed like that.
So I’ll humor her for a bit. I’ll play her game of not wanting me when every damn thing about her says she does. Then I’ll take what I want. “We’ll play your way. Then we’ll play mine.”
I want more of those lips. Of the taste of her. Of just her. Definitely even more than the sixteen-year-old did for that first kiss, years ago. And sure as hell more than the twenty-three-year-old me did the last time.
I forgot what it was like to have to work at getting a woman. The thrill of the chase. The desperation for the victory.
Ironically, it’s only ever been Bristol I’ve had to chase.
The woman standing before me with cheeks flushed and eyes skittish as she tries to deny she wants me just as much as I want her.
“There is no playing anything other than the guitar,” she says.
“The lady has jokes.”
“The lady has a job to do.”
“Ah, yes.” I watch her ass as she walks across the room. It’s hard not to, especially when she moves to avoid looking at me. “The never-ending questions. Christ. Tell McMann that the writing is what it is. My muse is silent—or maybe she died. Who the fuck knows. Art is tragic or some shit like that. No doubt, he’ll hear that sound bite and have people rushing in to try and fix shit that can’t be fixed.”
“Sounds promising.” She looks over her shoulder and lifts her eyebrows in challenge.