Meet Your Match (Kings of the Ice, #1)(35)

He was too busy staring at me.

I sucked in a stiff breath, blinking repeatedly before I finally tore my gaze away and adjusted my purse on my shoulder. I muttered unheard excuse me’s as I pushed through the team and the lucky girls who’d been selected to join them. I pushed farther, out of the ropes and through the crowd until I burst out into the humid night air. It was so hard to breathe, I gasped, trying and failing to fill my lungs.

I didn’t see the car we’d come in, didn’t even give myself time to think of calling one. I just started walking in the direction of the skyscraper holding me prison for the month I was doing this job, squeezing my eyes shut hard to try to clear what I’d just seen before I opened them again and put one foot in front of the other.

I hadn’t made it twenty steps before I was spun in a circle, Vince sliding his hand into the crook of my elbow and pulling me to a stop.

“You’re leaving?”

I blinked at him, eyes catching where he had lipstick smeared on his neck.

A harsh laugh burst from my chest.

“I’m surprised you noticed,” I snapped, and then I ripped away from him and started off in the direction I’d been walking before he stopped me.

“Let me get you a car.”

“I can walk, it’s not far.”

“You’re in heels. And it’s three o’clock in the morning.”

“I’m fine.”

Vince jogged around to stand in front of me, blocking my path. “What’s going on? Why are you mad?”

“I’m not.”

“So you breathe like an angry dragon and storm around town because you’re having a grand time?”

I scoffed, skirting past him. “Go back inside, Vince. I’m sure your fans are missing you.”

He didn’t follow for the next several steps, but then he jogged to catch up to me, blocking my path once more. I noted that he had been texting something on his phone, but he slipped it into his pocket when he caught up to me.

Probably telling his little groupies to meet him back at his place.

“Maven,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”

His eyes were lazy and glazed. He looked so sleepy and sexy and confident, and he watched me like he already knew the answer.

I glowered. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess I just wanted you to surprise me again, and found myself dreadfully disappointed.”

That beautiful, scarred brow lifted into his hairline. “How so?”

“You’re just like every other rich, professional athlete that the rules don’t apply to,” I said, shaking my head. “And it’s just so unoriginal.”

Vince frowned at that, almost laughing like he was confused. “The rules?”

But then the laughter faded, and something like recognition washed over him, smoothing out every feature of that beautiful, stupid face.

“You’re jealous.”

My eyebrows shot up into my hairline, indignation swirling with something akin to being stripped naked and put on display for the world to dissect. I swallowed all of it down, guard firmly in place.

“Wow.” I pushed past him, shaking my head, but he rounded me before I could take two more steps.

“You are, aren’t you?”

“Get a grip, Tanny Boy,” I shot at him, lifting my chin and standing even higher on my heels. “You couldn’t make me jealous if you tried.”

“Is that right?”

“It is.”

“Huh,” he mused, and before I could decide what to do next, he grabbed me by the hips, backing me into the brick wall of the building I’d been storming past.

I hit it with enough force to make me gasp, and Vince smiled down at me, blocking me in, surrounding me like a predator about to devour his first meal in days.

“So you don’t want me to take you up to my condo right now?” he asked, his voice low and seductive in the space between us.

He pressed into me harder when I didn’t answer, eliciting another gasp I wished I could keep inside. His thick thigh slid between mine, spreading me for him so much my skirt raked up six inches.

“You don’t want me to touch you the way I was touching them?”

He didn’t have to clarify who them was as his hand wrapped around my throat, my pulse thumping against his palm. He lifted my chin even more, forcing me to look at him.

“You don’t want me to haul this sweet ass over my shoulder and carry you inside,” he asked, running the tip of his nose along the bridge of mine. I tasted his breath when he finished his question. “To pin you against my window, hike this skirt up over your hips, and fuck you for the whole city to watch?”

My chest heaved against his, and he drove that thigh a little higher, taking my skirt with it as my eyelids fluttered shut.

His grip on my hips tightened, just a fraction, just enough to break me.

And I kissed him.

All it took was me pressing up onto my toes a centimeter more to press my lips to his, and I sucked in a breath when he groaned at the contact, his hand moving from my throat to the back of my neck and holding me to him for a long, ravenous kiss. His lips were so big, so firm as they demanded mine. I opened for him, moaning and squeezing my legs together when he dipped his tongue inside to taste me.

But as quickly as the kiss had come, he pulled it away, along with the rest of him.