This is possibly the largest epic fail at being seductive in the history of failed seduction.
“Why are you just wearing an apron?” he asks with what sounds like genuine confusion.
Every failed attempt at using my subpar feminine wiles brings me closer to one grave realization: Kai Wilder is a bachelor because he’s completely and utterly oblivious.
It’d be refreshing…if I wasn’t lying on the ground covered in flour, shame, and humiliation. It’d also be great if I was a girl who knew exactly what I wanted and went for it by jumping in with both feet, instead of timidly sticking one toe in the water at a time.
Baked goods is their thing. I thought a sexy baker was the best way to seduce him. I was supposed to be freaking irresistible.
Cursing, I push to my hands and knees and peer over the top of the couch. His eyes find mine, clearly bewildered. His eyebrows couldn’t get any higher unless he cut them off his face and glued them to his hairline.
“Why are you so red?” he asks, blinking a few times.
“Because your mother just caught me trying to seduce you in the most lewd way I’ve tried to seduce you yet,” I confess, keeping my face mostly hidden, only brave enough to continue peering at him from the safety of my spot behind the couch.
His eyes widen like that’s shocking news he never could have figured out all on his own.
Yep.
I knew it.
Completely and utterly oblivious.
“You were trying to seduce me?” he asks as though he’s baffled by the notion.
My annoyance heating and eating up some of the burning humiliation, I stand with an indignant huff and gesture down to the frilly pink apron that barely hides my nipples and my Brazilian wax.
He swallows thickly and tugs at the collar on his shirt, the first indication in weeks that he finds me even remotely attractive. I feel so friend-zoned again, and I have developed a complex about that, since we’ve had sex!
I found it to be toe-curling epic sex that has plagued my mind ever since. I wish I’d known how one-sided that was.
“Of course I’m trying to seduce you! Why else would I be naked under a ridiculously girly apron?”
He clears his throat a few times, and his mouth seems to struggle to keep a respectable firm line.
Is that bastard fighting a smile right now?!
“Your clothes are fancy. I just assumed you wanted to keep them clean. I was more confused about why you were in an apron when nothing’s cooking,” he confesses, his lips definitely fighting a grin.
He coughs, but it sounds like he’s suspiciously masking another sound.
Is that bastard fighting a laugh?!
“Don’t you dare find this funny! This is mortifying!” I say…well…it’s more like yelling, because I just can’t pretend to be civil right now.
I don’t usually yell, but for Pete’s sake. Why do I have to bluntly lay it all out on the line after his mother just saw me trying to seduce her son and clearly knew what I was up to?
“You’re the most infuriating man in the world right now. You can’t possibly be that obtuse!” I carry on, simply ranting by this point.
He works damn hard to mask all his amusement, though there is still a definitive glint of humor in his eyes.
“I’ve never had a girl try to seduce me before. Sorry,” he tells me, openly smiling now.
Crossing my arms over my chest, feeling absurd and ridiculous as that draft continues to remind me I’m barely covered, I glare at him.
“You’ve had a girl try to seduce you countless times,” I argue.
The genuine confusion that creases his gobsmacked expression would be hysterical, under the circumstances…if it was happening to anyone but me.
“When?” he asks.
I glare at him twice as hard, thankful I can’t explode his head with my mind. There’s a breaking point for a woman who has shamelessly thrown herself at a man and shattered every ounce of ego and pride she has in order to do so.
I have a whole new level of respect for Krysta Nickel at this point.
His eyes widen. “Oh! You weren’t pissed because I saw you changing when you were in your underwear. You were pissed because I didn’t catch on that you were seducing me! You were in your underwear on purpose!” he says like it’s an epiphany of some sort.
I palm my face. “Really? Figure that all on your own, did you?”
“You kept saying you were fine, but I could tell you weren’t fine,” he goes on, rolling out the “jaw-dropping” revelations that should have been annoyingly obvious at the time they were transpiring.
“Of course I said I was fine. Girls have to say they’re fine, or they get called clingy or needy or bitchy or some other unflattering adjective to describe them when they don’t do exactly like the critical world expects them to do,” I snap, truly exhausted by this point.