Page 32
“Wait… Are you hard right now?”
Chapter Fourteen
June
“Wait… Are you hard right now?”
His face does something complicated. Complicated and cute. A flush creeps up his neck and his jaw tightens, and for a second I think he’s going to lie about it.
“Yes,” he says. And there’s something in his voice that I recognize as embarrassment, which is not an emotion I’ve ever associated with Dylan Mercer. “It’s just a reflex. There’s nothing else to it.”
I stare at him. My hands are still on the ankle cuff, but I’ve stopped moving.
“A reflex.”
“Yeah.” He shifts slightly, which only makes it more obvious. “I’m nearly fucking naked, you’re nearly fucking naked, and we just spent ten minutes talking about sex with another hot woman in the room. It’s biology. That’s all.”
The explanation is smooth. Reasonable. Makes perfect logical sense if you don’t think about it too hard. But there‘s something in his voice that sounds wrong. Like a single wrong note popping into a song you know by heart.
He‘s lying.
Not about all of it. The biology part is probably true. But there’s more. There’s something underneath it he‘s not saying, something that makes that flush on his neck spread a little wider.
I should call him out on it. I should push. But pushing means examining it, and examining it means thinking about what it might mean, and thinking about what it might mean leads to a whole series of thoughts that I absolutely cannot afford to have right now.
Because I’m feeling similar things.
Standing here, kneeling here, whatever the fuck I’m doing here with my hands on his ankle and my body about ninety percent naked and my brain still slightly fuzzy from sleep and wine and the adrenaline crash of thinking he was going to kill me and then discovering he was making me breakfast. I’m feeling similar things and I don’t want to be feeling similar things because feeling things for Dylan Mercer is what got me into this mess.
But god, he looks good.
He’s always looked good. That was part of the problem. One of many problems. The abs and the arms and the shoulders and the way his body moves with a controlled grace that made me think dangerous and sexy in equal measure, which should have been a warning sign but just made me want him more. And now he’s sitting there against my radiator in nothing but boxer briefs that are doing absolutely nothing to hide what’s happening underneath them, and his hair is messy from sleep, and there’s still a faint red mark on his temple from where I hit him with the lamp, and he made me bacon.
Amazing bacon.
And he let me cuff him to the radiator so I could sleep. And he thanked me for letting him use the bathroom. And he barked like a dog to help me sell a lie to Molly.
This is bad.
This is dangerous in a completely different way than the knife was dangerous.
“Are you?” he says.
I blink. “Am I what?”
“Also turned on.”
I feel my face heat and I hate it, hate that my body is betraying me, hate that he can read me well enough to ask.
“No,” I say.
“You’re a terrible liar, June.”
“I’m an excellent liar. I just convinced Molly that I pee on people for fun.”
“That’s different. That was a performance.” His eyes are on mine, steady and gray and doing something that makes my stomach flip. “This is just you and me.”
I don’t know if he’s teasing or if he’s actually asking or if it’s some third thing, some blend of both that only Dylan Mercer could manage with his mindfuck manipulations. The tone in his voice could go either way. It’s light enough to be a joke, serious enough to be a probe.
