He kept his hands there as he lifted his eyes from them to mine and said in his deep, and now seemingly irritated voice, “You’re a lunatic.”
“Well, hello,” I replied. “So very lovely to see you again.”
He scowled at me, and it was then I smelled his cologne.
He hadn’t worn cologne the other times I’d been in his presence.
For my peace of mind, I wished he hadn’t worn it now either.
My nose picked up the herby head note of basil, definite heart note of plum with the base note of cedar.
If I had built the scent myself, I would have picked the same things for him, though I probably would have gone for bergamot or mint as a head note.
“You’re barely clothed, are you trying to freeze yourself to death?” he demanded, breaking into my fervent mental scent concocting.
“Allow us both, upon our much-dreaded reunion, not to exaggerate,” I replied. “I’m hardly barely clothed.”
“Every guy in there has been staring at your tits, or your ass, all night long,” he shot back.
I stared up at him.
“If Sully, Gage, Duncan, Harv, your brother, Rix and me hadn’t been liberally disbursing death glares, I could have easily punched fifteen men in the throat tonight.”
My gaze skittered to the windows, vaguely wondering who Rix was, not so vaguely wondering if this was true.
“Chloe, look at me,” he growled.
Yes.
A growl.
I looked to him even as my entire body got warmer, and it wasn’t all due to the coat.
I also started to feel peeved.
These contradictory emotions weren’t alarming.
For me, this happened a lot.
He tightened his fists in what I hoped was his own coat (I hoped this not only because it would be bad that he stole someone else’s for this interlude, but also it was a fabulous coat and said many good things about his level of taste—good things, I hastened to remind myself, I did not care about).
“Now, see, I came tonight expecting you to be here,” he stated. “And I came tonight expecting to have a conversation with you. And so I came here ready to apologize. But now, after hours of your horseshit, I’m wondering what I should be apologizing for.”
My…
Horseshit?
“You came here to—?”
I didn’t finish that question.
“I came here for Duncan’s yearly gig, and yeah, I came here hoping to talk to you.”
“Well, I’ve been here all night,” I pointed out.
“I have too,” he returned.
Did he mean…?
“Are you saying you expected me to come to you?” I asked, my words dripping with my feelings on the absolute absurdity of that idea.
“Fuck yeah, I expected you to come to me. How else was it gonna go?”
Apparently, I was going to need to state the obvious.
This, I did.
“You could have come to me.”
“Really? Was it me who verbally handed you your ass months ago?”
Hmm.
“And let’s talk about that,” he continued, taking his hands out of his coat but doing it moving into me so I had no choice but to move back. As I didn’t have far to go, it didn’t take much before I hit railing, but he kept coming, so he was this close to his body touching mine. He then leaned into a hand on the railing so he was even closer, and mostly fencing me in. “That was uncool.”
His last three words were difficult for me to process, because I had a nose full of deliciously plummy cedar and an eye full of a very pissed-off Judge Oakley.
Since, due to his silence, it seemed something was required of me, I parroted, “Uncool?”
“You making those assumptions of me.”
My brain scrambled through a fog of cedarwood and glittering brown eyes in an effort to try to remember what assumptions I’d made of him.
I didn’t have enough time to succeed in this effort before Judge carried on speaking.
“For months, I felt like a dick. For months, I worried about you. For months, I kicked my own ass because you made me think I’d kicked you when you were down. Then, for the last four hours, watching the ice queen hold court nowhere near me, I wondered how I became guilty of being the player out for nothing but to tap your ass when all I did was be very obvious about the fact I’m interested in you.”
I was catching up, and as such, I reminded him, “You seem to forget our first encounter, you made assumptions about me.”
“Give it up, Chloe,” he returned instantly. “I apologized for that and you’re a big girl. I was pulling your pigtail and you know it. You also didn’t tell me to fuck off. You jumped right in. Both times. And now we’re playing,” he twisted at the waist (though did it and still managed not to move an inch out of my space) and flung an arm behind him to indicate the party inside, “these games?”