Page 27 of The Wrong Game

It looked like a model home, not one she lived in.

“I bought it about eight months ago.”

“That explains the lack of photographs or any other indication that a human being lives here,” I teased.

Gemma just continued working the bottle.

“What made you want to leave the ‘burbs?”

The cork popped out of the bottle, and she dropped the opener with the cork still in it to the counter. “It’s a long story, and I’m too sober to tell it. Can we change the subject?”

“We can,” I said easily as I made my way over to the kitchen. I propped my elbows on the counter bar, watching her pour two glasses full of red wine. “What do you want to talk about?”

She handed me my glass, tilting hers up with a smile before she chugged half of it in one gulp.

“Cheers to you, too.” I lifted my glass with a smirk, taking a sip.

“Music!” she said loudly, snapping her fingers. Her dark hair swung over her shoulders as she pranced over to a large speaker in the corner of the room. “I should put on music. What do you like to listen to? Here, I can just put on… this.”

She tapped something on her phone, and a slow, sexy beat filled the room. When the first verse started, I couldn’t help but chuckle.

Let’s Get It Onby Marvin Gaye.

Her eyes went wide, and she glanced at me over one shoulder. “Oh God, this is too much, isn’t it? It’s too cliché.”

She clicked through her phone as I took another sip of my wine, watching her with a smile.

“I should have made a playlist. God,whydid I not think of making a playlist?”

She was still talking to herself when I set my wine on the counter, crossing the room to where she stood. I traced the lines of her slender neck, her back, the hair she pulled over one shoulder as she shook her head.

“Probably because I have noideawhat to put on a playlist for this sort of thing,” she murmured to herself, still playing on her phone.

“What sort of thing?” I whispered into the back of her neck.

She jumped a little as my hands slipped around her hips from the back, pulling her flush against me. Every muscle in her body was stiff, her breath caught between an inhale and an exhale.

“Uh… this… um…” she swallowed, still holding her phone, still stiff as a board in my arms. “Oh, God.”

“Such a religious woman,” I teased.

“Oh, God.”

I laughed, spinning her in my arms until she was facing me. I took her phone from her hands, set it on top of the speaker, and slipped my hands into the back pockets of her jean shorts. Then, I settled my gaze on hers.

“Hey,” I said, searching those endless green eyes of hers.

The way the low light of her lamps were reflected in them, I could see just the faintest hint of blue swirled around the pupils. But she couldn’t hold my gaze, looking at my chest or the floor, instead.

“Look at me.”

She shook her head.

“Gemma,” I laughed her name, tilting her chin up with my knuckle. “Look at me.”

When she finally did, it was the way a little girl looks at a closet door opening on its own in the dark. It was like I was every monster, every deep-rooted fear she’d ever known standing in front of her for the first time.

“Take a breath,” I said, and I started with a deep inhale, hers mirroring my own. “Now, let it out.”