Vini > Books: actually-funny-romances‎ (21)

I leaned forward. “A non-disclosure agreement? Aren’t these those things that mean I’m not allowed to talk about something you are going to show me? Is it a really weird mole? Because this might be a bad time to admit I have a thing for pulling out hairs. If you show me a hairy mole, I’m totally busting out the tweezers and having the time of my–”
Christian raised his palm toward me without a sound, cutting me off. I gulped and leaned back in my chair, hands on my thighs.
“If you sign this, I’ll tell you why you’re really here. If you don’t, I’ll give you a severance package and you can be on your way.”
“Oh my God. I read Fifty Shades a few years ago. I mean… Your name happens to be Christian… Are you actually some kind of perverted sex fiend?” I clamped my mouth shut when I saw the look on his face and pressed my lips together. “Sorry. Bad time for jokes

Lola jumped back suddenly, smiling while practically gasping for breath. “Sorry. I’m a little bit of a hugger. It won’t happen again. Sir.” She added that last bit after a delay. “Well, it won’t happen unless you do something really nice again. If you are nice to me, I can’t promise I won’t hug you.”
“I’ll do my best to avoid being nice,” I said flatly.

Mr. Stone stared. “Your dog escaped into a creek this morning and you had to jump in to save her?”
“After I’d already showered. Yes. So I had to shower again. Can you believe that?”
“I don’t, no. This is your first and final warning, Miss Thorn. I do not tolerate tardiness.” He took my arm in his hand and dragged me toward the elevator. I felt like a child getting scolded by her super-hot, grumpy teacher. I should’ve been mortified, but some twisted, perverted part of me hoped we’d get to the spanking part once the elevator doors closed.

I clenched my fists, biting out the words. “You owe me nothing, Lola. This was all my choice.”
She got up and grabbed the bowl of soup, carrying it to the sink and setting it down. “Then at least tell me what this is all really about. If you have feelings for me, act like an adult and just say so. I’m tired of the games.”

I shivered, melting into his touch when he put his big hand on my cheek, cupping it and drawing me closer. “Last chance to run, Butterfly.”
Oh, was he still rolling with the social butterfly nickname? “Why? Do you have handcuffs hidden in your pants or something?”

“I want to taste you so fucking bad,” he growled. His stubble tickled my inner thighs.
“Help yourself,” I whispered.
He looked up, quirking an eyebrow.
“I suck at dirty talk, okay? Just… do your thing. Please,” I added.

“We’ll come back here, and I’ll fuck you so good you won’t have any energy to feel guilty. Then–”
“Fuck me so well,” I corrected.
“No. I’m going to fuck you good. And I’ll fuck that proper grammar of yours, too.”
I scrunched up my forehead, pulling back to look at him. “If I knew good grammar was going to get me fucked by a man like you, I would’ve paid a lot more attention in school.”

I grinned when I rolled over to find Lola sleeping beside me in a pile of messy, tangled hair. Her mouth was hanging open and drool glistened at the corner. She had one leg thrown over the edge of the bed and an arm draped over her forehead. It looked like an explosion had sent her flying and she’d just landed in a heap on my bed.
I leaned in slowly to kiss her forehead. She sucked in a surprised breath through her nose, snorting and rolling over to begin an impressive string of snores

“I notice everything about you, but I only see the things that matter.”
He has no idea what those words mean to me, there’s no way he could. There’s also no way I can hold back the tears that fill my eyes.

Ash walked past her to stare down Chase face-to-face. “You deserve to know what a worthless scoundrel he is, Alex.”
“Yes!” Chase exclaimed. He reached for Ashbury’s hand and pumped it in a vigorous greeting. “Thank you. I’ve been trying to tell her myself, but she won’t listen.”
Ashbury looked more than a bit thrown by Chase’s invitation. He gave Alex a what-the-devil-is-he-on-about look.

“You know, you two have so much in common. You ought to be friends.”
“We are nothing alike,” Ash sputtered.
“No one could possibly confuse us,” Chase agreed.
“Of course not,” Ash continued. “One of us is a repulsive monster, and the other was scarred at Waterloo.”
She spoke over their protests. “You should see yourselves. You’re giving me identical scowls right this moment.”
“I am not scowling,” the two men said.
In unison.
While scowling.

Before departing, Ash addressed Chase. “If you hurt her, in even the slightest way, I will eviscerate you.”
“Understood.”
“I mean it, Reynaud. In fact, gutting would be too good for you. I will subject you to my cat.”
“Your cat?” Chase laughed. “To mewl at me, I suppose.”
“Trust me. We’re not speaking of the average cat.”
Alexandra spoke up. “I can attest to this.”
“I’ll strip you bare, tie your hands behind your back, smear salmon on your manly bits, and lock the two of you in a wardrobe. Once he’s clawed your ballocks to shreds, I’ll crush whatever remains of you to a bloody, formless pulp.”
“Good Lord.”Chase sounded a little awed. “That’s remarkably vivid. Did you plan all this out just for me, or do you keep a list of gruesome threats to use as the occasion arises?”

"I think the world is spinning.”
“The world is always spinning.”
He exhaled in a soft groan. “Well, that’s the truth. It’s spinning all the time.” “How about this. What if I say that you’re my world. You’re not spinning.”
“But I am. We all are. We’re on the earth, and it’s spinning, so we’re spinning, too.”
“You are ruining all my sweet nothings.”

"Have you ever seen those girls so happy?”
“Of course they’re happy,” he replied, sounding markedly less enthusiastic about it. “Daisy is surrounded by death, mummies stacked three to a case, and even Rosamund couldn’t dream of this much plundered gold.”

“Disease!” Daisy cheered. “Which ones?”
“Very, very boring ones,” he said. “And don’t cheer. It was misery. Now if all that wasn’t bad enough, once you were convicted in court?” He drew a finger across his neck in a throat-slicing gesture.
“Beheading,” Daisy awed

“You had better leave a detailed note for the great-great-grandchildren,” Ash said.
“That would require them to have children first,” Emma pointed out.
“Excellent observation. We’ll get on that right away.” Chase clapped his hands together. “On that note, good night and good-bye. All of you.”

“You are the last person I want to see.”
“Well, you are the last person I want to see, too.”
She gestured in exasperation. “Then why are you—”
“You are the last person I want to see before I fall asleep at night. Every night. The last woman I want to kiss for the remainder of my life. And your lovely face is the very last thing I want to see before I die. Because I love you, Alexandra.”

Letter : My dear imaginary Captain MacKenzie, you are not real and never will be. I, however, am a true and eternal fool.
Because, you see, you are mad for me. Utterly consumed with passion after just a few chance meetings and walks along the shore. You made me a great many promises. I was reluctant to accept them, knowing how our nascent love would be tested by distance and war. But you assured me that your heart is true, and I . . . And I have read too many novels, I think.

“There are a million shades of gray between good and evil, love. Am I on the darker end of the spectrum? Yes. Am I a bad man who does good things or a good man who does bad things? Both. But you made this monster your slave. All of what I am, good and bad, light and dark, belongs to you.”

“I know I’m damaged. But all my broken pieces belong to you.”

He says softly, “The tattoo is the first of many I’ll get with your name all over my body.”
My breath catches. I study his profile as my pulse begins to race. “But…why?”
His expression contemplative now, he reaches for the small silver cream server on the tray. “Because I’m yours. You’ve tattooed your name on everything inside me. The least I can do is make the outside match.”

When I whimper softly, he moves his hand down from my jaw to encircle my neck.
“Sweet little lamb,” he murmurs against my lips. “Hungry, aren’t you?”
“Why do you have to ruin everything by talking?”

He murmurs, “Be a good girl and ask for my dick.”
“Or you could be a good boy and just give it to me.”
He presses his teeth harder into my nipple, but if he thinks that’s a punishment, he’s crazy.

“Your face is red again.”
“And you’ve got more spinach stuck in your gums.”
“You also forgot your engagement ring.”
“If you reach into your suit pocket right now, I can guarantee I’ll draw blood.”
His intense gaze drifts up from my mouth to my eyes, where it electrocutes me. He murmurs, “Are you threatening your fiancé, darling?”
“Yes. And if you call me darling one more time, you can say goodbye to your two front teeth.”

"What the hell is happening, Callum?”
He drops his hands to his sides and blasts me with his most withering, he-man look, towering over me like Godzilla about to ransack a city.
I say flatly, “Yes, you’re very scary. Happy?”
“No.”
“What a shock.”

When liars like us fall in love, everything else falls apart.
But, for now at least, we’re falling together.

She spilled coffee on my shirt, which forced me to use one of my spare outfits. Frankly, I wasn’t even confident that a single spare outfit would be enough with this woman rampaging around in my life. She dented the company car when she was pulling it out of the parking garage because she swerved to avoid ‘a huge grasshopper,’ even though I’d lived in New York City for most of my life and never once seen a grasshopper. To top it all off, the banana she brought for me wasn’t ripe enough.

*****

I quietly fumed the rest of the way to the office, and nearly put another dent in the car when I ramped up the curb and narrowly missed a street sign with the front fender. It had been a while since I drove a car, and despite what people seemed to believe, it wasn’t at all like riding a bike. Then again, I had a long history of bike crashes, so maybe they weren’t entirely wrong.


*****

Keeping her at my side might have been more about keeping her alive than it was about whatever this strange game we were playing was.

*****

Want to get lunch before we go back to the office?” he asked suddenly.
I looked at him in surprise. “What, like a date?”
“Business meeting,” he said quickly.
“You don’t pay me and you don’t let me do anything remotely important. I’m going to call it a date if you won’t.”
He grunted, but didn’t argue the point.

*****

“I swear. I’m not usually the blushing virgin type. You just have a talent for embarrassing me.”
I chose that precise moment to bump my water and splash all the rolls and most of the tablecloth. I set my now-empty cup back upright and looked at the ceiling like I could expect some angel to come down and reverse time for me. Maybe they could go ahead and rewind about a week while they were at it.
Bruce didn’t even flinch. “You know. I think that was the longest you’ve gone without some kind of act of supreme clumsiness since we’ve met. It has been at least half a day.”

*****

Oddly enough, coming with her hadn’t felt like a choice. Natasha was accident prone and unlucky. She sometimes overlooked common sense in frightening ways, and the more I got to know her, the more I felt I needed to be by her side at all times just to keep her alive. But coming along didn’t feel like it was just about that. I wanted to be there for her when I saw how upset she was.

*****

I followed him if he went on a business outing, but beyond that, I was forced to wander around the office and pretend I was busy.
One of the easiest things I’d found to do was to sneak a paper off someone’s desk and make a bunch of copies of it. Then I could carry it around from one end of the office to the other until there was something to do.
It was ridiculous, and I knew Bruce knew, because I’d finally complained about it to him a few days ago. The smug bastard had just told me he liked seeing the “funny little ways” I came up to pretend I was busy.
“Hmm,” I heard Bruce say as he walked up from behind me. “A hundred copies of somebody’s order receipt for fiber pills from Amazon. Yes. I can see why we would need to circulate that around the office.”

*****

She leaned her head forward, and to my surprise, she pinned my zipper to her front teeth with her tongue in a seductive little pose and tried to pull it down. In classic Natasha fashion, it slipped out of her mouth. Her cheeks flushed red, which only made me even more turned on.

"I beg your pardon, Your Grace. I must have misheard.”
“I said I will make you

"I beg your pardon, Your Grace. I must have misheard.”
“I said I will make you a duchess.”
“Surely . . . surely you don’t mean through marriage.”
“No, I intend to use my vast influence in the House of Lords to overturn the laws of primogeniture, then persuade the Prince Regent to create a new title and duchy. That accomplished, I will convince him to name a vicar’s daughter from Hertfordshire a duchess in her own right. Of course I mean through marriage, Miss Gladstone.”

“Did you follow me?”
“I am a duke. Of course I didn’t follow you. I had you followed. It’s an entirely different thing.”

"Has it not occurred to you that I might have pursued you out of some genuine concern for your well-being?”
She gave him a doubtful look.
“I’m not saying I did. Only that it should have occurred to you.”

"Dear husband, I don’t believe I shall.” He dropped his fork and glowered at her. She smiled and reached for a nearby bowl. “Would you like more sauce, sweeting?”
His fingers strangled the stem of his wineglass.
She could practically hear the grapes calling for help. She hoped that was a good sign.
“If you don’t cease that nonsense,” he said, “you will regret it.”
“Is that so, my heart?” He plunked one forearm on the table and turned to face her. Piercing blue eyes, striking scars, and all. “Yes.”

Emma nibbled at an apple tart. “I’ve been thinking, dumpling.” He flopped back on the bed and groaned.
“Em-ma.”
"When we're in the company of others, I will call you Ash or Ashbury. When we’re alone, you’ll allow me my little pet names.”
“Fine. But you must confine yourself to an agreed upon list. No more rainbows and buttercups.”

"You should want to leave, too.” His voice darkened. “Unless you want to lift your skirts and sit on my lap so I can take you right here in the box.”
“You are always making these suggestions as though they should be threats. Meanwhile, I’m only intrigued.”