Playing It Safe(58)

“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.





CHAPTER TWENTY


When he starts to drive on the Dolphin Expressway and the landscape outside my window changes to the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean, I know we are heading toward South Beach. Alex still won’t tell me where we are going when I ask again though. And I do ask again. I think I might ask another five times the whole way, until we pull up to a driveway that is nestled amongst tons of palm trees and I see a long, tan, tarp-covered walkway that leads to the restaurant’s front door.