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“Good. Because that’s exactly what I’m doing.”
I crush her lips to mine, and she kisses me with the last vestiges of desperate anger from our fight. Our mouths clash for dominance, but I’m always going to win that one. She tastes like something I didn’t realize that I had to have. Like some kind of vital vitamin or mineral essential to my existence.
When she breaks the kiss suddenly, I growl. She’s mine. Those lips. That body. Her heart. All of it. I don’t care. I need it all.
“I’m literally here on a date with David,” she says, her breath hitching. She touches her lips absently. Looks up at me. Tentative. Guilty.
“End it,” I tell her darkly.
“Declan…”
“You haven’t made any kind of commitment to each other,” I say. “Otherwise you never would’ve left him in there and come out here with me.”
“I can’t just leave him.”
“You already did.” I take her hand, pull it away from her mouth, and kiss her again. Chaste. Simple. A reminder. “Now go in there and tell him you have to leave, or I will. I promise that you will prefer me not to be the one to break the news to him.”
“You’re an asshole,” Sophie informs me.
“Just figuring that out?” I don’t so much as grin as briefly show her my teeth. “Do what you have to do, come back out here, and I’ll take you home and remind you what it’s like to be fucked by a real man.”
“Unbelievable,” Sophie says, but I see the truth. The way her teeth worry her bottom lip. The glow of her eyes. She’s just as turned on as I am. Just as eager to see this thing through. To be with me.
“Just let me know if you want me to do it,” I say nonchalantly. “You’ll regret it though.”
“Fine. I’ll be right back.” She shakes her head and sets her shoulders. “Jesus. What he must think of me.”
I don’t give a shit what he thinks about her. What anyone thinks. Because Sophie is mine, and that’s all that matters. She was never going to be his anyway, even if I hadn’t gotten my head out of my ass and showed up tonight. Her light shines too bright for that.
I watch her go, enjoying the view but counting the seconds. If she takes too long, I’m going back inside the restaurant no matter what I said.
But when she exits the restaurant again a few minutes later, a flush high on her cheeks and looking determined and ridiculously fucking sexy, I flash her a real grin.
“My car’s over here,” I tell her, resting my hand on her lower back and steering her toward where I tossed a bunch of bills at a valet and snarled at him to keep it right where I put it in park, still running.
“Illegally parked, like a jerk,” she sniffs, but she doesn’t seem to mind how quickly we’re on our way.
Good. Because I need to get her back to my place as fast as fucking possible.
Chapter 32
Sophie
I regret wanting the butterflies. Because now, my stomach is flying away without me, sitting in the car beside Declan. That, or his driving is just so aggressive that I’m getting carsick—and without dinner too.
It doesn’t matter. I’m only hungry for Declan, more than half of me still not sure if this is a dream or if I’m really here, curled up in the leather passenger seat of his very nice car.
“So… that model at the re-launch party,” I say, my words filling up the quiet of the car. “There was really nothing between you?”
“Less than nothing,” Declan replies immediately, his voice firm and sure. “I was trying to keep up appearances, to make it seem to the outside world like I was unattached, but I should never have let her touch me. I shouldn’t have let her put her hands on me when the only person I wanted to have touching me was you.”
A knot that I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying around in my stomach loosens at that. He told me during our fight in the storage closet that he hadn’t been sleeping with anyone else, but it was hard for me to believe him in the heat of the moment.
I believe him now though. There’s something in his tone that rings of pure truth.
“I missed you,” Declan murmurs, his deep voice breaking into my thoughts. I glance over to find him looking at me before his gaze cuts back to the road. His chest expands with a deep breath, and he shakes his head slightly. “I missed you so damn much I thought it might kill me. I must truly be addicted to you, because not having you—not being able to touch you or kiss you or make you laugh—felt like dying.”
A shuddery exhale falls from my lips. I can hear the remnants of the pain he’s describing in his voice, and it soothes the ache in my chest even more. Because I wasn’t the only one suffering while we were apart. We were both torturing ourselves by trying to deny what we wanted.
