“Ruin their good time?” I say, swirling the dregs of my own drink. “Annoy them until they leave the resort early?”
“Hmm.” She leans her head back onto my arm. The cherry’s still there, her glass pretty much empty.
“His girlfriend’s not an innocent victim in all this, is she?” I ask, the thought suddenly occurring to me. I’ve been so wrapped up in Kat’s vengeance that I kinda forgot there was someone else involved, too.
“His girlfriend who was fucking my fiancé behind my back?” she asks dryly. “Nah.”
“Did she know?”
I realize it’s a bit late to ask, but still.
“She was his assistant,” Kat snorts. “Yeah. She knew.”
“Jesus.”
She shrugs and drains her drink until there’s nothing but ice and a single maraschino cherry left, bright red in the dark, fucking taunting me to steal it from her. Fuck. I don’t even like cherries that much, but I do like riling Kat up.
“Any idea what they’re planning on doing here?” I ask her, after a long silence because I need to say something, to have a plan.
“I don’t know, Silas,” Kat sighs, exasperated. “It’s a resort. There’s a pool. There’s hot tubs. There’s a river and some trails and some tennis courts, I think.”
“Do they play tennis?”
“I half-listened to a phone call, I didn’t record them and memorize their plans,” she says. “I’m not even sure we’re at the right place, remember?”
I finish the last watery dregs of my own drink, then put the empty glass on a side table, fighting a grin at the edge in her voice.
“I’m starting to think you lured me out here for the pleasure of my company,” I tease her, and Kat huffs out an explosive little laugh.
“Definitely not.”
“You sure?” I ask, eyeing the cherry in her glass. It is calling my name. “Because it seems like—”
I grab for the cherry. It takes me a second, because everything in her glass is wet and slippery and I’m trying for the stem but I get the fruit instead, and the second Kat realizes what I’m doing she yelps and tries to stop me.
Her glass spills to the couch, getting freezing water and ice over both of us, and she’s got one hand around my wrist, hauling my hand forward, and with the other she’s trying to dislodge the cherry but we’re both slippery.
“You asshole,” she hisses. “Goddammit, Silas. Give me that.”
“You weren’t eating it.”
“I wasn’t eating it yet.”
“There’s gotta be some sort of time limit,” I point out as her fingers slide around mine. We’re mangling this cherry and I can hear her breathing, feel the heat of her hand locked around my wrist. She’s surprisingly strong.
Then she stops and looks at me, eyes narrowed. I grin back at her.
“You could say please,” I say, my voice comes low and scratchy as tires on a gravel road.
Then her mouth is on my hand and I don’t have another thought, because as she sinks her teeth into the cherry they scrape my fingers and then there’s the hot heat of her mouth against them, the slide of her tongue on the pad of my thumb, her hand still holding my wrist, and then she’s got the cherry but her lips close around my fingertips and there’s a flutter of teeth and tongue and she’s sitting up straight, plucking the stem from her mouth and chewing her prize and looking at me like she won the Superbowl or something.
All I can do is watch her mouth and listen to my heartbeat crash against my ribs. I wait, breathless, for her throat to move in the dark. It does. She licks her lips.
The next second my mouth is on hers.
Kat is hot and sweet, soft and sharp. Kat tastes like maraschino cherry and rum and she pushes back against me, hard, threads her fingers through my hair. Kat slides her tongue against mine and makes a noise when she does and she trails her cold fingers down my neck until I gasp into her mouth, grab her wrist, pull it away.
“Quit it,” I growl, but she laughs and bites my lower lip and then we’re kissing again and she’s half on my lap, her cold hand splayed open on my chest. I grab her waist, her back, her hip. I want to dip my fingers under the hem of her dress. I want to see if the red mark I left when I fell asleep on her is still there. I want to leave five more marks on her neck and I want her to suck the cherry juice from my fingers and look at me with her sharp dark eyes while she does it.
But I settle for this kiss, for her hands on me, for my fingers in her hair and the sound she gasps into my mouth when I wrap it around my fingers and tug just hard enough.
That’s within the rules. So is the kiss I plant on her jawline, on her throat, careful and closed-mouth this time. Kat made rules and God knows I’ve memorized them, the creases in my printout worn thin, every boundary respected with military precision. That, at least, I’m good at.
But Kat pulls back before I can say something, her lips flushed deep pink in the dark. Her eyes look like they’re all pupil and she swallows again, breathing hard, and her gaze flicks over my shoulder, her spine straightening.
Don’t look at him. Look at me,I think, and I want to take her face in my hands and kiss her until we’ve obliterated everything else, but I don’t. I put on a smile and I turn, and exactly as I expected, Meckler’s standing there with a pretty blonde and they’re watching us.
“Hey, Meckler!” I call, like I didn’t just have Kat half wrapped around me. “Fancy seeing you here!”
He nods and raises a beer, his eyes on Kat before they turn away.