Isn’t the lock on the inside?
Yes.
Liv, you horny sweet summer child. He didn’t lock you in. He locked himself out.
The revelation hit her like a smack to the forehead. Mansi was right: Chuck wasn’t trying to stop her from doing anything; he was stopping himself with a physical barrier between them.
Oh, she texted her friend.
Yeah. That’s like oddly kind of romantic?
Olivia thought about it and realized Mansi was right again. Locking the door was a bizarre and slightly chivalrous show of restraint. As if he knew he needed help to keep his hands off her—and to keep them from losing any more money than she was sure they’d already just lost.
But that indicated a much larger problem, money aside. The locked door meant he badly wanted to touch her, if not more. Based on the hunger in his kiss she could still feel lingering on her lips, she knewexactlywhat he wanted.
And did she want it too?
She chewed her lip and dug her toes into the plush carpet. It didn’t take her long to realize what she needed to do.
Shit, Manse. Yellow bikini.
Mansi responded with a photo of a trio of penguin chicks huddled together on the ice like fuzzy gray bowling pins.
Olivia weakly smiled at it and flopped back on the bed, knowing it was going to be a long night.
Chapter
10
Chuck did this thing withhis tongue and teeth, kind of an erotic one-two combo punch, that always left Olivia gasping. She discovered on Saturday morning that the effect transferred to dreams almost as intensely as experiencing it in real life.
She woke gasping and damp with sweat in a tangle of sheets. With the way her blood was speeding through her veins, she half expected to find Chuck in bed beside her having just finished his torturous combo. But she was alone. And in need of a cold shower.
By a small miracle, the bedroom door had stayed closed all night. She left it that way as she entered the bathroom to shower off her dream and brace for inevitably having to interact with Chuck—and to face the music about how much they were going to be penalized for the kiss. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he completely avoided her, but she was surprised when, after her shower, she found him in the kitchen flipping pancakes.
He stood shirtless at the stove with his back to her, and Olivia wondered if she was still sleeping and having some kind of food porn dream. White powder dusted the counters. A small stack of dirty mixing bowls teetered near the sink. Three eggshells oozed goo on a plate. The scene was a disaster, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Chuck standing in the middle of it all with a towel over his shoulder and mumbling to himself.
“Come on, come on.Yes!” he quietly hissed when he successfully flipped a fresh pancake onto a plate. He turned around with a finger in his mouth, licking off whatever he’d stuck it into, and jumped at the sight of Olivia. “Oh! Liv, I didn’t hear you come in.”
He set the plate down and pulled the towel from his shoulder to wipe his hands. He was shirtless, his hair was a mess, he still wore his glasses, and he had a smudge of powder on his nose.
It was, quite possibly, the most attractive she’d ever seen him.
“Where’s your shirt?” was the first thing that came out of her mouth.
“I got batter on it, so I took it off,” he said like this was a perfectly rational explanation.
“Oh.” She sat on a stool largely to keep her knees from wobbling. Her mind was off somewhere distant and feral.
He reached for a banana out of the fruit bowl and split its peel. He then picked up a knife and set about slicing the banana on top of the pancakes.
“What is this?” she asked, and nodded at the whole scene: the fresh coffee, the banana pancakes, the bottle of syrup. Clearly, he was making her favorite breakfast.
Chuck inhaled and let out a big breath. “It’s…an apology for last night. Well, an attempt at one. I burned the first three rounds.” He cocked his head to the end of the island, where astack of charred pancakes sat waiting to be dumped into the trash.
The memory of their encounter in the hall would have swept her off her feet if she weren’t already sitting down. She might have been the one to end it, but she hadn’t done anything to stop him from starting it.
“Chuck, you don’t have to—”