Twisted Love (Twisted #1)(22)

“Biological reactions can be mastered.”

I couldn’t resist—I scooted closer to him on the couch and pushed his shoulders forward so I could run my palm down his back.

His muscles bunched beneath my touch. “What,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Are you doing?”

“I’m searching for your control panel.” I patted his back, trying—and failing—not to notice the sculpted contours of his muscles. I’d never seen Alex shirtless, but I imagined it was glorious. “You must be a robot.”

I received a stony glare in response. See? Robot.

“Do you have to swap out your batteries, or are you rechargeable?” I teased. “Should I call you R2-D—”

I yelped when he grabbed my arm and spun me around until I straddled one of his legs. My blood roared in my ears as he tightened his grip on my wrist—not enough to hurt, but enough to warn me he could easily break me if he wanted.

Our eyes locked, and the roaring intensified. Beneath those jade pools of ice, I glimpsed a spark of something that sent heat curling through my stomach.

“I’m not a toy, Ava,” Alex said, his voice lethally soft. “Don’t play with me unless you want to get hurt.”

I swallowed my fear. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”

That mysterious spark crystallized into anger. “This is why Josh was so worried about you. You are trusting to a fault.” He leaned forward a fraction of an inch, and it was all I could do not to lean back. Alex’s presence crackled with coiled energy, and I had the unnerving sense that beneath all that ice lay a volcano waiting to erupt—and God help whoever was around when that happened. “Don’t try to humanize me. I’m not a tortured hero from one of your romantic fantasies. You have no idea what I’m capable of, and just because I promised Josh I’d look after you doesn’t mean I can protect you from yourself and your bleeding heart.”

Pink blossomed on my face and chest. I was torn between fear and fury—fear of that hard, unyielding look in his eyes; fury over how he spoke to me like I was a na?ve child who couldn’t tie her shoelaces without hurting herself. “This seems like an overreaction to a simple joke,” I said, my jaw tight. “I’m sorry I touched you without permission, but you could’ve told me to stop instead of giving me an entire speech about how you think I’m a helpless idiot.”

His nostrils flared. “I don’t think you’re a helpless idiot.”

My anger edged out my fear. “Yes, you do. You and Josh both. You always say you want to ‘protect’ me like I’m not a grown woman who’s perfectly capable of handling herself. Just because I see the good in people doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. I think optimism is a good trait, and I feel sorry for people who go through life believing the worst of others.”

“That’s because they’ve seen the worst.”

“People see what they want to see,” I countered. “Are there awful people in the world? Yes. Do awful things happen? Yes. But wonderful people exist and wonderful things happen too, and if you focus too much on the negative, you miss all the positive.”

Utter silence, made all the more awkward by the fact that I was still straddling Alex’s leg.

I was sure he would yell at me, but to my shock, Alex’s face relaxed into a hint of a smile. His fingers grazed the small of my back, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

“Those rose-tinted glasses look good on you, Sunshine.”

Sunshine? I was sure he meant that mockingly, but the butterflies in my stomach stirred to life anyway, fanning away my anger. Traitors.

“Thanks. You can borrow them. You need them more than I do,” I said pointedly.

A low chuckle slipped from his throat, and I almost fell to the floor in shock. Tonight was turning out to be a night of firsts.

Alex’s hand trailed up my spine until it rested on the back of my neck, leaving a cascade of tingles in their wake. “I feel it dripping all over me.”

He did not—what? An inferno consumed my body.

“You’re—you—no, I’m not!” I sputtered, pushing him away and scrambling off him. My core pulsed. Oh my God, what if I was? I couldn’t look, afraid I’d see a telltale wet spot on his jeans.

I’d have to move to Antarctica. Build myself an ice cave and learn to speak penguin because I could never show my face in Hazelburg, D.C., or any city where I could run into Alex Volkov again.

His chuckle blossomed into a full-blown laugh. The effect of his real smile was so devastating, even amid my mortification, that all I could do was stare at the way his face lit up and the sparkle that transformed his eyes from beautiful to downright breathtaking.

Holy crap. Perhaps I should be grateful he never smiled, because if that was what he looked like while doing it…womankind didn’t stand a chance.

“I’m talking about your bleeding heart,” he drawled. “What did you think I was talking about?”

“I—you—” Forget Antarctica. I had to move to Mars.

Alex’s laughter subsided, but the twinkle in his eyes remained. “What’s the next movie?”

“Excuse me?”

He angled his chin toward the DVD on the table. “You brought two movies. What’s the second one?”

The sudden subject change gave me whiplash, but I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t want to speak about my dripping anything with Alex. Ever.