“Someone else has the same icon as yours,” Vale explains. “You will both take a shot of tequila. That’s the ‘shot.’ And you kiss the person who has the same item you pulled. Like a hook-up. Hook Shot, but you don’t actually hook-up. It can be a quick kiss.”
She laughs, waggling her brows suggestively. “But it’s more fun when it’s not.”
“Kiss?” I huff a fuck that laugh.
“It’s like Spin the Bottle,” Amanda adds with a shrug. “Like you played in high school, but . . . older and with better kissing.”
Dammit, Banner, you owe me big time.
“Nah.” I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”
“But it’s zee game,” Vale says, dismayed. “In your honor. Hook Shot is a real game. We did not make it up. Just added fashion.”
“It can be zee game all it wants,” I tell her, grinning to soften the absolute truth that I’m not interested. “I’m not playing.”
Games always have me doing stupid shit, and then when I resist doing stupid shit, I look difficult.
“It’s fun, right?” JP asks when he walks up. “Hook Shot. Get it?”
I don’t want to kiss him or Chase or whomever has the other boot. The only person I’d want to kiss has a button. And I’m tired of watching Chase run after her all night. Even now he’s caressing Lotus’s bare arm and sliding his hand down her back as low as it can decently go without grabbing her ass. He’s agitating me.
“No one has to kiss. Only those who want,” JP says, leaning forward and inviting me to laugh with him. “Some like to watch.”
“Yeah, JP, I think I’m gonna. . .” I stop when I see what he clutches loosely in his hand.
Maybe this night is salvageable.
“So you asked what you need to do to sign me for the watches, right?”
The speculative gleam in JP’s eyes brightens and he nods slowly.
“Oui,” he replies with a grin. “Tell me how.”
3
Lotus
“Chase, I said no.” I inject some steel since he doesn’t seem to be getting the hint.
“Why not, Lo?” He cages me against the bathroom counter with his body.
“I don’t have to give you a reason except I don’t want to.” I shake my hands dry since he’s blocking the towel. “I’ve tried to be nice, but you following me in here is not okay.”
“We had a good thing.” He kisses my neck and cups my breast, finding the ring piercing my nipple and squeezing.
“Get the fuck off.” Space in the below deck bathroom is tight. When I shove him, his back hits the door.
“Are you crazy?” Chase snaps, voice low and his face reddening. “You want people to hear?”
“Touch me one more time and everyone will know ‘cause I’ll be kicking your pasty ass all up and down the observation deck.” I step to the door he’s blocking. “Move.”
“Tell me what I did,” he says, his voice and frown softening. “I know it was good for you, too, so why—”
“Chase, I just want something else right now.”
“Someone else?”
“If I did want someone else, that’d be my damn business, but I just want myself. I got shit to figure out. Me shit. Nothing to do with anybody else, and I don’t need attachments, even casual ones, complicating things.”
“Casual? Lo, we weren’t casual.”
“Yes, the hell we were, Chase. You could have fucked all of SoHo twice and started on Hell’s Kitchen—I wouldn’t have cared. We weren’t even casual. We were convenient. I wanted some dick. You wanted some pussy. I was willing and you got lucky, but luck’s run out.”
“And now I’m no longer convenient?”
I sigh, no patience for some needy boy sniffing in my pants tonight. “Don’t act like you haven’t had this conversation a hundred times with girls.”
“Yeah, but this is different.”
“Awwww, is rejection new for you and your dick?” I make a fake sad face. “I feel so bad for the two of you.”
“Is this temporary?” he asks.
Is it?
I have no idea. Chase was the domino that dropped and started this boycott . . . pun intended. That sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction, the ache for something more had been nagging whenever I had sex for a while, but that last time with Chase, fear crept in. He’d held my wrists together over my head, and something changed.
Snapped.
Broke.
He’d held me that way before. Other guys had, too, and it never bothered me. It actually turned me on, but that time was different. I forced myself not to struggle and claw for Chase to let me go. Rationally, I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, but the panic wouldn’t listen. When we were done, none the wiser, he lit his usual post-coital joint, but I ran into the bathroom and collapsed on his shower floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
I can’t do that again.
“I don’t know how long it will take me to sort this stuff in my head,” I finally answer Chase, forcing myself out of the troubling memories.
“Like . . . mental stuff?” he asks, his glance wary, like I may be hiding a butcher knife in my sundress.
“Wow, you make me want to pour my heart out,” I say, sarcasm dripping along with my hands. “I need that towel.”
He steps aside and watches while I dry the last of the water from my hands. Before he can continue the inquisition, I jerk open the door, only to stop short. Kenan leans against the wall in the small passageway, muscle-corded arms folded over that powerful chest. His long legs are crossed at the ankles.
It’s a big ship, and I’ve been able to avoid him for the most part tonight. He poses a threat, and doesn’t even know it. It’s like he’s walking around with a bomb strapped to his chest, completely oblivious that someone’s out there with a thumb hovering over the trigger. A six foot-seven-inch bomb of lean, explosive danger.
There’s something regal about his bearing that goes beyond height. Beyond the thick, slashing brows, mahogany skin and high-sculpted cheekbones. The strong chin, and the extravagance of lips so full in a face so lean and spare. It’s inside of him. An assurance. Confidence. Esteem. I felt the force of it each time we met, and I ignored it. I had to. His posture is indolent, but his eyes—dark, intelligent, alert—fix on Chase over my shoulder.
“Everything okay?” he asks, his voice a warning rumble.
I don’t know what he heard or how long he’s been here, but I do believe if I say no, he will knock Chase into next week. And as much as I kinda think Chase deserves it, we can’t have that.
“We’re cool,” I answer, glancing over my shoulder at my once-upon-a-fuck buddy. “Right, Chase?”
“Uh, yeah.” Chase’s pupils flare and he shifts like he’s grappling with his fight-or-flight instinct. With a man as big as Kenan, fighting really isn’t a smart move, so I’m guessing Chase is all flight right now. “We’re cool.”
He pushes past me quickly and heads back to the party without another word.
“You sure you’re okay?” Kenan asks, a frown puckering over probing eyes.
“Positive. Chase and I have an understanding.”
“You’re dating him?” he asks, his tone neutral, but not fooling me. He cares what I say next. I’ve never experienced such instant chemistry as I did with Kenan, but as vulnerable, as empty as I’ve been feeling lately, maybe as I’ve been feeling for a while, he’s not what I need. I need simple. Easy. And this man is neither of those things.
“We were never dating.”
“Oh, I thought—”
“We were fucking,” I correct. “But not anymore.”
A muscle ticks along the chiseled line of his jaw. “I see.”
He pushes off the wall, stepping closer. Everything in me wants to shrink back. Not because I fear him, but because I fear myself, my response to this man.
I stand my ground, enduring the intoxicating scent of him and the wash of warmth when he’s so close his massive body eclipses the world past his shoulders.
“So does that mean the way is clear if someone else wanted to take you out?” he asks, his voice a strong, gentle hand stroking my skin.
“No, that’s not what it means.” I look up to catch his eyes and refuse to look away even when the cartilage around my knees starts to marshmallow. “It means the opposite. Road block ahead.”
“A road block?” He looks down, so far down at me, one brow quirked, questioning.
“You can’t get through, but there are alternate roads. A detour.” I nod my head toward the party. “Amanda, for one, seems like she’d enjoy being your alternate route.”
“Nah.” He shakes his head. “She’s not my type.”
“Oh, pretty, blue-eyed blondes with big breasts not your type?”
“Used to be.” He barks out a short laugh. “I was married to one for a long time.”
I’m quiet, choking on something. A woman couldn’t be more opposite of me than blue-eyed and blond. I don’t even know this man, so it shouldn’t sting that he belonged to someone else, that he chose someone so antithetical to me.
“Well, if you change your mind, Amanda’s a road I’d call . . . well-traveled,” I say, going to step around him. “So wrap it up tight if you ever do ride.”
“Like I said, I’m not remotely interested in Amanda,” he says. “I’m very interested in you. I’m in New York all summer. Let me take you out.”
“Detour,” I remind him and follow the path Chase took a few minutes ago.
“There you are,” JP says when I re-enter the room, but he’s looking up and over my shoulder. “We couldn’t start without the guest of honor.”
When Keir explained Hook Shot, I immediately tensed at the possibility that I might be randomly paired with and asked to kiss Kenan. I would have probably bowed out of the game. I have before at some of these parties, but I overheard Kenan talking with Vale, and am almost positive I heard him say “boot.” Besides, JP was walking around with the button in his hand, barely trying to hide it. The most JP will give me is one of his famous air kisses.