She pulled the glass back to her side of the table. “Suit yourself. Your restraint is remarkable when you want it to be.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She found the straw buried in the cream and took a long, brain-freezing pull. “It means we should talk about what we came here to talk about.”
Chuck sat up straighter and leaned his elbow on the table. “Right.”
The elephant between them was that neither of themshowed restraint when it came to the other person. Not emotionally. Not physically. They were explosive magnets, and they both knew it. And an explosion would not lead to the million-dollar paycheck they both needed.
“Ground rules,” Chuck said.
Olivia nodded. “Ground rules.”
They stared at each other, neither of them sure where to start.
“No sex?” Olivia said, jumping straight into the deep end.
Chuck sputtered into the coffee he’d been about to take a sip of. She handed him a napkin. “Sorry,” he said, and dabbed his lips. “Going right for the big one there.”
Olivia shrugged. “I mean, it’s the most obvious and problematic one, right?”
He gave her a look that positively melted her to the booth. “Olivia, the sex was never a problem.”
Heat curled up from low in her belly and spread into her every extremity. She pressed her thighs and her lips together. The urge to throw her milkshake aside and climb across the table into his lap was the exact reason she knew this was the most important rule.
“No, it wasn’t a problem,” she agreed. “It was what came after.” She took another pull of her shake in an effort to lower her body temperature. “And before, honestly.”
Chuck sighed, as he too was well aware of the cyclical nature of their problems. Fight, make up, fight, make up. Rinse and repeat. On and on for all eternity. There was no beginning and no end, but part of what kept pulling them back to each other, part of what made them put up with the fighting, was their physical connection. If they cut off that life source, they just might be able to really call it quits and survive living together.
“No sex,” he agreed.
“And if there’s only one bed in the house, I get it.”
A laugh popped from his lips. “Liv, it’s a house in the Palisades. It probably has like five bedrooms.”
“Oh, I seriously doubt that, Chuck. It’s probably a condo, and the pool and gym they mentioned belong to the property complex. They know we can’t stand each other. I’m sure they are planning a hundred ways to sabotage us—remember the crypticchallengesthey’ve got lined up? You really think they’d put us in a house large enough that we could avoid each other?”
“That…is an excellent point.” He stroked his jaw again. “What else do you think they might do?”
Olivia sighed. “I don’t know. Forcing us to eat, sleep, and exist in the same space is bad enough, isn’t it?”
Chuck gave her a look that she couldn’t fully interpret. “You’re right. So, I guess we just keep our distance?”
“As best we can, yes.”
A silence settled between them aside from Olivia’s straw hitting an air pocket in her milkshake and making a rude sucking sound. Chuck’s phone pinged with a message.
He reached for it, and Olivia noticed his lips twitch up at the corners when he looked at the screen. He started tapping out a response.
“Who’s that?” she asked, rotely and not even thinking she didn’t have the right to inquire about his personal business anymore.
“My sister,” he answered just as automatically as if the idea of new boundaries hadn’t registered to him either. “She’s pretty pissed at me right now.”
“Why?”
He stopped typing and looked up as his phone let out thewhooshsound of a sent message. “Because of this whole situation,” he said, and waved his hand over the table.
She knew he didn’t mean Chelsea was upset that they were having an evening chat at a diner.