Page 4 of Give In to Me
“And the ice preference?”
He’d noticed. That she’d noticed. The two cubes, not three.
She read his face as he said it. His focus was absolute, almost predatory, and she understood, in the wordless way a body understands heat or gravity, that he was cataloging her the same way she’d been cataloging him. Every detail. Every tell. He knew she’d been observing him and he’d been aware of her observing him and the knowledge sat between them like a live wire, crackling.
Katy felt the flush climb her neck, felt the heat of it bloom across her collarbone and up to her ears, and she could have lied. Could have saidoh, I just guessedorthe last server told me.She was standing in front of a billionaire in a polyester uniform and the gap between them was the width of a tax bracket and the depth of the Pacific Ocean and the smart thing, the safe thing, was to play dumb and walk away.
“I pay attention,” she said. And then, because her mouth had apparently seceded from the rest of her body and was now operating as an independent nation with no regard for self-preservation: “To you. I pay attention to you.”
The moment she said it, she wanted to take them back. But when her gaze flew to his to assess the damage—
One second he was Julian Ventura, billionaire, recluse, a man who wore his composure like a second skin, and the next his eyes were burning over her face, her hair, her mouth, her throat, with a raw hunger so open and so helpless that she felt it against her skin like heat from a fire. His hand on the table had gone rigid. His jaw was locked. His whole body was held so tight she could see the tension in his shoulders, his arms, the tendons of his neck, as if the only thing stopping him from reaching for her was the table between them.
“Julian.”
She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“It’s Julian. Not Mr. Ventura.”
A first name. An open door. Such a small thing, and it went through her like spring through frozen ground.
“Julian,” she found herself repeating, self-consciously, but also...helplessly. Like finally having her first taste of something she had been craving for so long, and finding it even better than she could ever have imagined.
Katy had been saying his name in her bedroom for a year, into her pillow, into the dark, a name she kept like a secret. But this was different. This was his face three feet away, and when she said his name, his eyes dropped to her mouth and stayed there, and she noticed his throat move as he swallowed. Hard. Like the sound of his name in her voice had hit him somewhere he hadn’t braced for.
“I’m going to go now,” she announced, the words coming out croaked. “Before I say something else I can’t take back. Which I will, if I stay, because apparently you break whatever filter Inormally have, which is already not a great filter, so.” She picked up his empty glass. Her fingers brushed the spot where his hand had been gripping the table. The surface was warm. “More water?”
“Yes.” The word came out clipped, almost harsh. Angry at the water for giving her a reason to come back.
“Okay. Great. I’m leaving now. To get the water. That’s why I’m leaving.”
She turned on her heel and walked four steps. Professional. Collected. A girl who definitely had her life together and had not just narrated her own exit to a billionaire who’d been examining her throat like he wanted to put his mouth there.
That thought stopped her mid-step.Put his mouth there.She didn’t know where the words had come from. She’d never thought anything like that about anyone before. But she’d felt his eyes on her neck, on the pulse point where her blood beat against her skin, and her body had translated the attention before her brain caught up, and the translation was:he wants to touch you there. He wants his mouth there.And the knowledge went through her like a lit fuse, bright and fast and impossible to unfeel.
She walked back to the bar, set the tray down, and braced both palms flat on the counter until her heartbeat dropped below the threshold where she could hear it in her own skull.
DIONNE ARRIVED AT FOUR.
Her sister arrived as she always did. Immaculate, poised, smelling like the good perfume their father’s money could buy.Dionne Gates at twenty-nine was everything Katy wasn’t. Tall where Katy was average. Polished where Katy was freckled. A top-notch lawyer with a corner office and a car that didn’t burn oil and a monthly lunch with Katy that she kept like clockwork.
“There you are.” Dionne’s heels clicked across the stone. She reached out and tucked a strand of Katy’s red hair behind her ear, a gesture so natural that anyone observing would thinkhow sweet, the older sister checking on the younger one.“You look cute in the uniform.”
“It’s polyester.”
“Still cute.” Dionne’s dark eyes swept the terrace. The members, the tables, the arrangement of money and power spread across the stone. Her attention settled on Table Nine.
On Julian.
Katy studied her sister’s face and saw nothing. No reaction, no tell. Dionne assessed Table Nine with the breezy confidence of a woman who belonged wherever she stood.
“Dinner Thursday?” Dionne squeezed her shoulder. “New poke place in Silver Lake.”
“Sounds great.”
“Love you, Kates.”
“Love you too.”
