Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91635 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 458(@200wpm)___ 367(@250wpm)___ 305(@300wpm)
Yet if anyone was drawing anyone in with penetrating looks…it was Amani, the knowing surety in his heavy-lidded gaze seeming to tug at the strings holding Vic together, threatening to unravel him into pieces and put him back together as something else. Someone else. Someone he didn’t know or understand, when the self he’d thought he’d known would never have lingered on the coolly mocking curve of Amani’s mouth, the fullness of his deeply red lips, the way the sweeps and angles of his lashes turned his gaze into a sly thing of catseye curiosity and alluring distance that only dared Vic to try to get closer.
To touch the untouchable.
And perhaps one part of him wanted to accept that dare, to challenge it, for he drew another step nearer, closing the distance between them. “You think I’m trying to make you fall at my feet, Amani?”
“Not deliberately.” Amani cocked his head, the tumbling fall of his glossy black hair drifting across his face, teasing against his mouth, as he regarded Vic. The slender gold chains in his hair chimed softly, beckoning with their whisper. “But I think you don’t know how to turn off, even with people you aren’t interested in. Is that the real reason you don’t date?” His eyes glittered, his gaze pointed. “Because you like to chase, but not to catch. You like to lure people in, capture them, but never keep them.”
“I…I don’t know.” The sarcastic rejoinder on Vic’s tongue dried. He was accustomed to having an easy answer for everything, but he didn’t have an easy answer for this—and it ached, when he thought about it. When he thought about the emptiness of it. Still he drew closer, until he drifted to a halt before Amani, looking down at the man who, if he were honest with himself, was entirely beautiful in the shimmering evening light. “You don’t even know me. How do you know me?”
“I know men,” Amani murmured, leaning toward him. “Part of who I am and what I do is seeing people. Intuiting them. Understanding them.”
Vic chuckled briefly. The closer Amani drew, the harder it was to think, the heady scent of smoky vanilla and a hint of that subtle, softly sweet scent of the oil he recognized from the parlor washing over Vic and stealing into his veins until his blood ran too hot, seeming to sear him from the inside out until his voice was a raw and tattered thing in his throat. “So you think you understand me?”
“I think…” Amani’s lips curved slowly, a cunning and enticing smile of white teeth against dark skin. “…you might want to stop flirting with me. Just because I’m pretty doesn’t mean I’m one of your society women or social climbers.”
“I never said you were. Nor did I say I was flirting.”
“You didn’t have to say it.” Yet still Amani was leaning into him, and somehow Vic was swaying in to meet him; for such a small, lissome man, Amani had the gravitational pull of a neutron star. His gaze dropped, lingering on Vic’s mouth with a near-physical touch, then rose to his eyes again. “You couldn’t handle me, straight boy.”
“No doubt,” Vic whispered, and closed the distance until their bodies brushed.
Amani flowed into him for one moment of wild pulse-beats, of lean sleekness leaving imprints on Vic, giving him just a flirting taste of what Amani could feel like. Then Amani fell back, draping his shoulders against the pillar once more, and Vic couldn’t stop himself from leaning after, reaching up to brace his hand against the marble over Amani’s head, creating a single pocket of shadowed space captured like a secret between them. He almost dropped his own glass, fumbling to set it onto the shelf next to Amani’s, nearly knocking over a spherical crystal vase bristling with water lilies. He didn’t know what he was doing, right now. What he was feeling.
But as long as Amani was looking up at him that way with his lips parted and his eyes darkened with a thousand untold things…
It didn’t seem to matter.
“It’s a good thing I am straight, then,” he murmured.
Amani arched a sardonic brow, lifting his chin, head tilted so invitingly up toward Vic. “Entirely.”
Somehow, Vic found himself leaning down. Somehow he found his lips parting not on words, but on the ache to taste that luxuriantly full-lipped mouth. Somehow he found himself closing the distance between them yet again, and his chest was tight and his body felt strange all over, and the only sounds between them were his heartbeat and a breath of, “One hundred percent heterosexual.”
“So…”
“So…?”
Amani lifted one long, angular hand and lightly circled a finger against the V of Vic’s T-shirt, the slightest pressure and yet the intimation of contact set off tiny explosions inside him. “So you shouldn’t be so close to me.”