Page 25 of Serpentine Valentine

“Gone?” she asked quietly, her eyes so intent on mine I couldn’t blink.

I nodded.

She didn’t release our hands. Instead, she opened my palm andtraced the ridge of calluses across my upper palm with her thumb.

I trembled and told myself there was a draft.

“Strong hands,” she noted, then scraped the edge of her nail across the thin skin at the center of my palm. “Calloused hands. I thought you’d be softer.”

She’d thought about me?

My pulse throbbed so sharply I could barely focus on anything but its staccato beat and the feel of a girl holding my hand.

“Field hockey,” I croaked out in explanation.

“Mmm,” Lex hummed, dipping her head to look between our bodies, her hair swinging forward to brush my cheek like a silken kiss.

I almost choked on my sharp inhalation when she dipped slightly and one hand found the skin at the back of my knee under the hem of my skirt. She traced her nimble fingers up, up until she could curl them around the side of my thigh, flexing her grip to test my strength.

Without releasing me, her hand hiking up my skirt so I was exposed to mid-thigh, she looked up through her lashes at me with eyes like wet concrete, trapping me inside that gaze. “I should have known.”

“Thunder thighs,” I whispered because I couldn’t gather enough breath for normal speech. “It can’t be helped.”

“Why should it be? Strength in women is underappreciated,” she said, flexing those fingers again, then digging her nails into my muscle so I involuntarily clenched. “Strength in women is nothing but sexy as hell.”

“You think?” I’d been insecure about my compact, athletic frame my entire life—ever since Sally Martinez told me I looked like a boy in second grade.

“I know,” she confirmed, patting my thigh like I was a good girl, some prized bit of horse flesh.

Ugh, but why? Why was everything she did so sexy?

Why was I noticing it?Unable to walk away from it?

I felt like I was one lingering caress away from a mental breakdown.

“Why did you have blood on your neck?” I asked, straining to return the conversation to something less erotic.

She tilted her head in that way I was coming to notice was habit, an animal form of curiosity. “Why do you care?”

“Well…” I laughed, a little shaky because why was she still so close, only a thin wedge of pressurized air between us even though she’d let go of my thigh, my hand. “I guess that’s a good question. Wouldn’t anyone ask it?”

“Probably, but I wouldn’t answer just anyone honestly.”

“Will you answer me?” I asked, wincing at how eager I sounded. How eager Iwas.

Her eyes scraped over my face and neck, lingering at the upper ridges of my breasts pressed together by the button-up vest.

“Maybe, one day. I don’t give up my secrets for just anyone.”

I hadn’t thought so, and the idea of being her confidante was like wine on the back of my tongue. Every breath I took was filled with her scent. I was getting dizzy. Forgetting myself the way I did whenever I’d had too much to drink.

I swayed closer to her. “What does a girl have to do to earn a secret?”

Was I flirting? I wondered dazedly.

“Why would little Miss Popular want one of my secrets?” she countered, and all I could think wasyes, I was flirting, andwas she flirting back?

“I don’t know,” I whispered honestly, a little wrecked. “I just know I can’t stop thinking about you.”