Shopping for a CEO (Shopping for a Billionaire #7)(6)

“Yes, but he wasn’t obsessed with, you know...” Obviously distracted, Marie’s voice tapers off as she looks at the giant dining table, a cross between a tornado and the president’s nuclear bomb briefing room. Have you ever seen those reality television shows about the preppers who buy things like coconut flour in 55-gallon drums, or who dehydrate 9,000 pounds of cherries for the day the zombies take over?

Marie’s the prepper version of a mother of the bride. Except substitute chocolate fountains and Haggis for the cherries and you get the basic idea.

“Dog butts?” Shannon offers helpfully.

Andrew walks in just then. Of course he does. The man knows how to make an exit from my life. Over and over and over. That one he has down to a T.

And now, apparently, he’s perfecting the art of awkward entrances.

“Speaking of *s,” I murmur.

There goes my heart, beating triple time at the sight of him. But this time, I have the upper hand. I’ve got the goods on him.

And he knows it.

“You’re safe,” he says to me in a weird voice. Tight, as though angry, but relieved, as if he cares.

“Of course I’m safe. What are you talking about?”

“You disappeared at the marina.”

Now Declan, Marie and Shannon pay full attention to us, Marie dropping everything. Her eyes light up. Oh, no.

No no no no no.

She’s already busy planning one wedding.

She doesn’t need another one, even just in her head.

“You two had a date at the marina?” Marie asks in a voice that goes up at the end like a wedding planning erection. Like all the blood in her body swells to fill Something Blue.

“No date. In fact, I just happened to walk along the water and ran into Andrew talking about his new appointment as the C—”

Andrew’s across the room before I can finish, his warm, muscular arms around me, lips on mine. He tips me back, like a stage kiss, as if the way his hands press into my waist and back aren’t more than a surface-level gesture.

He tastes like wine and nearly two years of questions.

I wonder if I taste like beer and nearly two years of frustration.

My thoughts quiver, then fade, as the kiss melts me. If this is just for show, he’s putting his heart and soul into it. And his tongue. Definitely his tongue. His hands snake down and one cups my ass, the other pulling me tight. His tongue takes its time, like he’s at the beginning of negotiations for the deal of his life.

Maybe he is.

The man is in no rush.

“I don’t understand,” I hear Marie say as if she’s a thousand miles in the air, floating on the wind with a hundred helium balloons clutched in one hand. “Andrew is Mr. Anal Gland Hands?”

The spell is broken.

“Does he even have a schnauzer?” she asks a gape-mouthed Shannon, who is staring at me and Andrew like she’s spotted Sasquatch and he’s snacking on little tempura versions of the Tooth Fairy and Santa’s elves.

Andrew pulls away, his mouth covered in my lipstick. Plum Passion. Our eyes meet and he gives me the same damn jaunty grin he flashed the other two times we kissed.

He comes back in to nuzzle my neck. I can’t breathe, yet I’m panting. I’m panting so hard my lipstick should be called Panting Panty.

And then he murmurs, “Don’t say a word about my being named CEO.”

I freeze.

That’s it? That’s the only reason he chased me down and kissed me? To shut me up?

So I do what any self-respecting woman would do to a guy who has now kissed her twice in closets during crisis points in her best friend’s life.

I pull back and slap his face so hard my palm turns purple.

From the lipstick.

Marie gasps. Shannon lets out a little scream.

Declan smirks, the kind of smile that has zero mirth in it, and mutters something that sounds like, “Great. Asshole Boyfriend Summit coming tonight. I’m not getting any.”

Marie’s eyes narrow. Out of the corner of my field of vision, I see her walk up to the enormous stainless steel refrigerator and open the freezer section.

“Shannon,” she stage whispers. “We’re going to need more ice cream for this.”

“Not sure there’s enough for this situation, Mom,” Shannon answers in a high, reedy voice.

It feels so good to slap the bastard. No, really. It’s as if my arm has been coiling, waiting like a hunter sits for days before slaying the perfect beast.

Andrew is a beast. A perfectly gorgeous, one-hundred-percent selfish, modern-day Adonis who thinks he can just kiss me in private and I’ll let him. Like I’m on a kissing retainer and he can access me at will.

“I’ll thank you to stop kissing me. It’s not in the corporate contract between our respective companies,” I snap. My heart is pounding so hard it’s like it’s boxing with itself, my ribs the punching bag, my pulse throbbing in time with some rhythm set by the pure fury of being wronged by a man I can’t stop being attracted to.

Damn it.

His jaw is open, his hand pressed to the growing red spot on his face where I hit him. My palm tingles from the scrape of skin against five o’clock shadow, and the humiliation of realizing all that passion I felt was just a game to him. Those deep brown eyes stare at me with an intensity that belies everything I’m feeling.