Page 29 of Ruthless Claim

Then she kisses me back.

There’s nothing soft and romantic about it. Both her hands come up and she fists them in my shirt hard enough that I hear the fabric strain.

She kisses me like she wants to win something, like this is the continuation of the argument by different means.

Her nails find my shoulders through the fabric and dig in, and I make a sound low in my throat and pull her closer.

I break the kiss because I need to see her face.

She’s breathing hard, and her lips are parted.

The flush across her cheekbones is so deep it reaches the base of her throat, and she looks at me with those wide near-black eyes that are stunned and livid all at once.

Her expression is cycling through things too fast for me to read any of them.

Her lipstick is ruined and she stares at me in shock.

Then, she slaps me.

Fuck, she slaps hard.

It’s an open palm slap across my cheek, and the sound reverberates around the room.

I feel the sting bloom across my face but I don’t move.

I just look at her.

Her hand is still suspended in the air between us, the imprint of it still registering in my nerve endings, and her chest is heaving.

I look at her and she looks at me and neither of us says a single word.

Then she grabs my shirt and kisses me again.

It’s harder than the first time, if that’s even possible.

Both her hands are pulling me toward her, her fingers twisted in the fabric, and this kiss isn’t stunned or hesitant.

She’s making a decision, a fully conscious, fully furious decision, and I feel it in the insistence of her mouth against mine, in the small desperate noise she makes when my hands find her waist and pull her flush against me.

I walk her backward without breaking the kiss, her back hitting the table.

Her legs shift and her hips press into mine.

I exhale something that sounds embarrassingly close to her name against her mouth.

“Don’t,” she says, her lips still brushing mine, “say anything.”

I chuckle. “Wasn’t planning to,” I tell her.

She pulls back just far enough to look at me, her fingers still in my shirt, her dark eyes moving across my face like she’s checking for something.

I don’t know what she finds, but she makes a decision about it then her hands move from my shirt to the buttons of it.

I lift her onto the dining table.

Something crashes behind us and I assume it’s the dinner she “made”, but clearly neither of us cares.

She wraps her legs around me and pulls me into the circle of her body.