The Blush Factor (The Hawthornes of New York 2)

Laughing, I take a sip of my water.

He studies me as he lowers his glass. “You’re blushing.”

Scooting a hand over the bridge of my nose to my left cheek, I shake my head. “I’m not.”

“You are,” he insists. “Tell me something.”

“What?” I whisper.

“Did I beat out Tim on the blush factor scale?”

The glass in my hand shakes as I repeat those words in my head over and over.

Oh my fucking god.

He read it. Matthew Hawthorne read my diary.

There is no doubt – zero absolute doubt- that I’m now blushing.

On that juvenile blush factor scale I used in my diary when I was sixteen and seventeen, this would be a full-fledged five out of five.

“Oh, shit,” Matthew says with a wince. “I should have warned you that I read a few pages of the diary before I brought it over this morning. I wanted to make sure it actually belonged to you before I bothered you.”

Still not making eye contact with him, I let out some mumbling grumbly sound from between my lips.

“I’m sorry, Faith,” he continues. “The first entry was about your date with Tim and how he made you blush. You rated that a three out of five.”

Because Timmy Conwertson was a dud.

He asked me out for tacos when I was sixteen, expected me to pay, and then told me and I quote, “I want my penis in your vagina.”

By the grace of all things embarrassing, I didn’t include that last part in my diary out of fear my mom or dad would stumble on it.

“You read the first entry,” I repeat, trying to wrap my mind around that.

Those first few hundred entries were tame. I was sixteen and as innocent as innocent could be.

I’d kissed a couple of boys by then, but that was the extent of my experience with the opposite sex.

I graduated to touching and oral sex by the time I was seventeen.

I’ve never launched past that, though, and my diary details all of that. The same diary he opened last night.

“Tim sounds like a catch.” He takes a bite of pizza as if this is a general, run-of-the-mill conversation.

“He wasn’t.”

Matthew chews before he swallows hard. “I was joking.”

I manage a half-assed crooked smile. “That was a long time ago.”

Swiping a paper napkin over his lips, he looks me in the eye. “I don’t know a guy who had it together in high school. I sure as hell didn’t.”

That’s hard to imagine. I picture him as the smooth as fuck senior who had girls lined up in droves to get a piece of him.

I don’t think much has changed in his life since then other than the number of sexual partners he’s had.

“So, did I beat him?” he questions. “Tim? I made you blush harder than him, didn’t I?”

Nodding, I stare at him, amazed by the fact that he’s not batting an eyelash over the fact that he read part of my diary, and I’m freaking the hell out on the inside.

Maybe I’m holding it together so well on the outside that he can’t tell.

“You beat Tim.”

“Rate me.”

Seriously?

“What?” I scrunch my nose. “You want me to rate you?”

“I promised you fun tonight, Faith.” He strokes a finger over his perfect jawline. “This is fun.”

Maybe for him. For me, it’s edging toward humiliation and a point where I crawl under this table and hide.

“You gave Tim a three out of five on the blush factor scale, so what am I?” He edges up both dark eyebrows. “A five? A solid four and a half?”

Drawing in a deep breath, I lean both elbows on the table and study his breathtakingly handsome face. “You’re a three and a half.”

He sets his head back in heavy laughter. “I barely edged out a sixteen-year-old kid? I need to up my game.”

Chapter Eleven

Matthew

I’m a bad man.

I’m a very bad man because I’m sitting across from a blue-eyed, lush lipped beauty whose diary tempted me during the wee hours of this morning.

So far, I’ve not only teased her to the point of luring a pinkish hue to her already rosy cheeks, but I’ve jacked off to a few of her diary entries that mentioned yours truly.

That’s right.

Faith Upton wrote about me in the lined pages of the book I found in the elevator last night.

I wouldn’t have even noticed my name save for the fact that I accidentally knocked her diary off my foyer table when I staggered into my apartment at two this morning.

It fell open on the floor to a page well past the center of the book.

I picked it up, glanced at it, and was instantly hard.

I saved to memory every word written on that page and others in feminine cursive handwriting.

The entry that drove me to unbuckle my pants in my foyer and palm my achingly hard dick went a little something like this, or exactly like this if my sleep-deprived brain serves me correctly.