I looked at him across the table. “You say that like I’m already supposed to be listening.”
“Ain’t you?”
I smiled, picked up my drink, and stood.
Micah stood too, smooth and immediate, giving me room to slide into the inside of the booth. He didn’t make a show of it. Didn’t explain. Just moved like that was where I belonged, tucked in and comfortable, with him on the outside.
I hated how much I liked that.
Before he sat, he reached behind him and loosened the cord holding back one side of the red velvet curtain beside the booth. The heavy fabric fell with a soft rush, not enough to shut us away completely, but enough to blur the lounge around us and turn the corner into something warmer, closer, more dangerous.
My eyes moved from the curtain to him.
He sat beside me like he had not just done something entirely too intimate in public.
“What?” he asked.
I lifted my glass and took another sip of my drink because apparently I had decided to help my own downfall along. “You always closing women in behind curtains?”
His mouth curved. “Only when I want to hear what they’re really saying.”
A slow pull started beneath my ribs, then slipped lower before I could pretend his words had only amused me. My thighs pressed together under the table, uselessly discreet, and the sip of the French 75 I had just taken seemed to turn warm everywhere at once.
The room did not disappear. The music stayed where it was. Glassware still moved. A couple at the bar laughed too hard at something that could not have been that funny. But behind that loose fall of velvet, everything felt muted and warm, likethe booth had turned into a small private world with red walls, amber light, and Micah Sutton sitting close enough to ruin me.
His thigh brushed mine and stayed there.
Neither of us mentioned it.
His hand landed lightly at the back of my knee under the table, just enough contact to let me know where the rest of him was.
“You do that on purpose,” I said softly.
“Do what?”
“Act like you don’t know what your hands are doing.”
He looked at me then, really looked. “I know exactly what they’re doing.”
My breath lost its rhythm.
Just for a second.
But he was close enough to catch it, and the quiet confidence in his face made it worse. Something in me softened and tightened at the same time, that awful, delicious awareness of being wanted by a man who was not guessing his way through it.
I turned my face just enough to catch his scent again. Warm. Expensive. Familiar now in a way it had no right to be yet.
His hand slid from the back of my knee to my thigh. It was not far. It was not vulgar. It was only enough to make my breath change all over again and my whole body gather itself around the point of contact like it had been waiting all week.
The curtain shifted a little beside us, soft velvet breathing with the movement of the room, and for one wild second, I felt caught.
Not trapped exactly.
I would have moved if I wanted to.
That was the problem.
I did not want to.