Untamed (A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance)(152)

I reach over to the bottle, and pour myself another full glass of champagne. I take a big sip, grinning. I’m feeling it, the buzz. It feels good. I like this sensation.

“So you got daddy issues, then?” I tease. I’m feeling a bit prickly now.

“Just to remember him.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged a person who fights for a living to be sentimental.”

“The best fighters have the strongest emotions. It’s where the strength, the drive, comes from.”

“I didn’t know that,” I say, nodding. I’m feeling good. I’m feeling confident. Maybe it’s the champagne. Maybe it’s the fact that, for the first time tonight, I seem to have the upper hand… I seem to be in control of this conversation.

“My mother and father divorced a few years ago,” I say. I feel like I’m balancing the scales, making the conversation fairer. After all, he told me that his dad died.

“I know,” he says.

I blink. “How?”

“My mother told me.”

Inside me, I feel a kind of irritation begin to bubble like the champagne is in the glass I’m holding. Am I wrong to feel that this is too personal information for him to have known via my father’s girlfriend?

“She told you that?”

“Yeah. You’re uncomfortable with that.”

I don’t miss that it’s a statement. “It’s personal,” I tell him.

“I also know you don’t have a good relationship with your mother.”

“So?” My voice betrays my tension. I don’t like that he knows these things about me. I don’t like that I didn’t know he knew.

He shrugs. “Nothing. Just want you to know what I know about you.”

“Oh, you’re doing me a favor are you? So I don’t tell a lie or something?”

He shrugs again, and it pisses me off.

“No,” he says. “But I’d want to know what you know about me. I never want to be at a disadvantage. Isn’t it the same for you?”

“There’s a thing called discretion.”

“Discretion is fucking overrated,” he says. “So, what has your dad said about my mom or me?”

“Nothing!”

He frowns. “Really?”

“Disappointed?” I fire. I’m biting back now. But he doesn’t react the way I expect him to. Instead, he just looks at me for a while. His eyes go to my lips, then to my neck.

He leans forward, and he presses his forehead against mine. I don’t know what to do. I’m at a loss for words. I’ve never been this close to a boy before. Not like this, anyway.

“Have you always got your claws out?” he asks, his voice low. I can smell the champagne on his breath. It’s so intimate, so close.

“I don’t have my cl—”

He presses his lips against mine, and I melt. My whole body falls limp and I let him kiss me. I let him claim my mouth, my lips. I let him taste me with his tongue, give my lower lip a soft bite with his teeth.

Eventually, feeling returns to my arms, and I wind them around his neck. It’s my first kiss ever, and I don’t know what to do, but all I want to do is press my body into him, get closer, feel his heat on me.

I get up and try to straddle him, but he stands, too, and pushes me against the glass window. I know there’s a security guard in there somewhere, and he’s probably watching – or awkwardly trying not to – but I don’t care.

The only way to describe his hands is hungry. They’re running up and down my sides, over my hips, my ass. He gives it a squeeze lifts me up to my toes, and breaks the kiss.

I try to capture his lips again, try to give myself to him again. I want him. Oh, God, I want him.

“Pen,” he says, pulling his head back a little.

I gaze into his eyes, brow furrowed, feeling self-conscious and rejected.

“What?” I ask, now pulling my own head back. He cups my face in his hand, and brings my head forward, and slowly, ever so slowly, he runs the tip of his tongue around my ear.

Then he whispers, “You’re drunk.”

“So?” I say defiantly. But I notice now that I’m standing, I’m feeling off-balance, wobbly. I can’t focus on his eyes properly.

“I can see it,” he tells me. “You eat dinner tonight?”

“No,” I tell him. “So what?”

He backs up, leaves me standing alone pressed up against the window. He picks up the empty champagne bottle and the two glasses. He empties one glass over the edge of the balcony.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll drive you home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I tell him. I feel… compromised, now. I feel like he’s seen my cards. I feel at a disadvantage.