by Piper Lawson
I was still struggling to reconcile his multiple personalities in my head. There was the friendly, sweet Dylan who’d been there for me with Jake and with my family, who’d do anything for his. I still hadn’t fully worked through what he’d told me the night we were together, and as we hadn’t been alone since—probably for the best—there hadn’t been a time to bring it up.
Then there was dangerous Dylan. The one who was sexy as hell and made me dream of him doing things to me I’d never even thought of before. The Dylan that had pretty much blown me to pieces a week ago.
The worst part was that they were the same person. If they hadn’t been, it would’ve been easier to stay away. The first had been a great friend to me this fall. When I’d needed him he’d been there. The second might wreck me, but despite my best intentions, I craved him. If it had been just sex I could’ve put this off. But I wasn’t ready to deal with cutting him out of my life entirely.
Tuesday Jane and I were in the library working on a term project with two other classmates, Jess and Shawn. It was a case study on a company that was up for bankruptcy. We had to work through the legal implications, recommend solutions, and present it back to the class.
I’d offered to take the lead on the presentation.
“We need to do something different, something that will make it stand out.” We’d booked a bigger room for our work, with a table that seated eight. My study room would’ve been way too cramped.
Shawn leaned back and put his feet up on a chair across from him, looking skeptical. “How are we going to make bankruptcy exciting?”
Jane interjected. “Trust me, Lex could sell sand to the Coastal Commission. She’s the right person for the job.”
Jane was working on the recommendations. Since she was actually going to be a lawyer, we thought she’d be best equipped to tackle the most important part.
We’d divvied up the work when my phone buzzed.
Lex?
Yeah
How’s the studying?
Good
I’m trying to make bankruptcy sexy
You make everything sexy
I flushed a little, then mentally chastised myself for it. I had to be more careful with my words.
Is that a line?
Yeah I’ve been hanging around Rick
Not a great influence
I turned back to the task at hand and had just gotten my head back into things when my phone lit up again.
So here’s the thing
I’ve been having some trouble with my studying lately
This came as a surprise. I thought school came easily to him.
Do you need a tutor?
Yep. Wanna tutor me?
I know zero about engineering
It’s not the subject matter that’s getting to me
Think I need some new study strategies
What’s the problem?
I realized I shouldn’t have asked. The constant texting meant I was having a hard time getting down to business on this project. I was about to ask him if we could pick this up later when his response beat mine.
The problem is that every time I sit down to read, I keep picturing you on top of me
I nearly dropped my phone. I did look up at the bent heads around me. Jane glanced up and tilted her head inquisitively. “Everything OK?”
“Yeah, no worries.” Someone was bound to notice me blushing, the way my thoughts had suddenly taken a track that had nothing to do with law.
Good thing we were texting and not talking. My throat was suddenly dry. I went for glib.
Sounds like you need to diversify your inspiration… Try porn
No.
Sorority girls? I hear the Delta Zetas will do anything
I don’t want porn or sorority girls
I can’t get you out of my head
Well. Way to lay it out there. I took a deep breath. Tried to think about unsexy things. Like bankruptcy, which incidentally I was supposed to be in the process of making sexy. Life evidently had a sense of humor.
Try harder
I’ve tried EVERYTHING
Believe me
Without my consent, my mind conjured an image of Dylan, touching himself. I felt a flush creep up my neck and swallowed hard. The others had gone back to work.
This thing with us just can’t happen Dylan
What thing? The thing where you moan in my mouth when I’m sliding into you?
Holy crap. The library was freezing cold but I was sweating.
Dylan clearly was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. In some arenas he might’ve been a rookie, but he caught on fast and was an expert at getting what he wanted. He’d figured out the charming Boy Scout routine wasn’t working and had upped the stakes. Had zeroed in on my weakness. As much as I cared about friend Dylan, it was his alter ego that had me lying awake at night.
Dylan, I have to get back to work
And I did. But later, at home in bed I reread his messages. It wasn’t as good as being with him, but it was better than nothing. And I slept better afterward.
Chapter 20
I walked downstairs that Saturday morning in a threadbare blue tank top and sleep shorts with unicorns on them. I’d gotten them when I was thirteen and they fit a bit tighter now, but I loved them and wasn’t ready to let go. My hair was pulled back in a loose bun. Girls’ voices and the smell of coffee greeted me as I made my way toward the kitchen.
Ava, Jen, and Emily were sitting around the table talking. They were dressed casually, but their makeup was done. Given the relatively early hour, there was some plan in place I didn’t know about.
“Hey, Lex!” Jen called when she heard my feet on the steps. “We’re going to the mall, then the beach. You should join.” It had been unseasonably warm this fall. Which was why I could wake up sweating even though I was wearing almost nothing. The only reason.
Rounding the corner to the kitchen, I pulled up short. Standing before me in glorious 3D was my very own guilty pleasure, complete with bottomless brown eyes and just-fucked-looking hair. The best part? He was holding the coffee pot.
“Want some?” An innocent grin accompanied the rest of the package.
It wasn’t enough for him to be in my head 24/7, now he had to be in my kitchen? Freaking great. Yeah, I wanted some. Wanted to knee Dylan Cameron in the nuts. Then pull him down on top of me.
I was grumpier than usual. That happened when a girl didn’t get her sleep. When she lay in bed at night thinking about lips and tongues and …
“Shouldn’t you be at the Delta Zeta house or something? You know it’s Saturday morning, right?” I grabbed a mug from the cupboard and set it down in front of him so he could pour.
“Funny. You know I come here for the scintillating conversation.” Dylan’s voice was smooth and pleasant.
“Mmmm. Big word for 9:00 a.m.,” I muttered into my coffee cup as I took the only empty seat at the table.
“It means brilliant and clever. See, hanging with you is teaching me all kinds of new things.”
I nearly choked on the coffee. Glared at him out of the corner of my eye. If it were possible, his grin got bigger.
“So are you in or what?” Ava interrupted our exchange, blissfully ignorant to the subtext.
I loved the beach, but had committed to finishing a first draft of our business plan. Kirsten was going to review it and give feedback at the end of November, and one of my business professors had volunteered to look it over once first.
“I’ll pass. Maybe catch up with you later.” Turning to Dylan, “Is shopping part of your lifelong learning experiment?”
“Nah, I just came to drop off the car so they could.” His dimple flashed.
“What a good brother.” I emphasized the last two words, wondering if he’d get the hint. He clearly did and ignored it.
“I am, aren’t I?” He was leaning up against the counter, looking maddeningly at home. In my kitchen. “Thought I’d stay and study for a bit, figured it�
�d be quieter here than at my house.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said. Fate was clearly trying to throw him in my face. Punishment for letting him do wicked things to me.
“We should go!” Ava jumped up and gave Dylan a quick hug. “Thanks for the car. Stay as long as you like. But fair warning, Lex is pretty OCD when she’s working, and she’s been extra cranky lately.” I opened my mouth to protest, and from the corner of my eye—since I refused to look at him—saw Dylan’s lips twitch. “If you aren’t quiet she might take your head off. Consider yourself warned!”
The girls grabbed their bags and vanished out the door. It was suddenly too quiet and I was in a bad mood. I stared at my mug of coffee, hoping it would swallow me up or explode or do just about anything to get me out of this situation.
“Are you going to take my head off?” Dylan smirked. I had to look at him.
“Are you here to study or piss me off?” I countered. My tone was unusually biting, but the words seemed to roll off him.
“You’re right.” Grabbing waffles that jumped out of the toaster, he popped one in his mouth and put the other on a plate. He walked across the room with that damned catlike grace and dropped into a chair across from me. It looked like he actually was going to study, I thought as he reached down and grabbed a stack of books I hadn’t noticed off the floor. He opened one on the table in front of him as he chewed thoughtfully, lashes lowered as he focused on something on the page.
Maybe he was just provoking me, and had gotten past his ulterior motives. I hadn’t received any more heated texts since earlier in the week. If he was making peace I could at least try to be cordial. “What are you working on?” I asked as I stood up to go wash my mug out in the sink.
Dylan glanced up, then back down. “Physics. The underpinning of every good engineer’s training.” He played with the corners of the book while he read, absently fanning through the pages with his thumb and index finger. “Everything you need to know in a mere six hundred and seventy-eight pages.”
Maybe the funny, easy Dylan I could relax with was making a comeback. “I never took it. Probably a good thing I’m in business. If it doesn’t have a dollar sign in front of it I don’t care.” I didn’t sound like myself but was mostly looking for things to say. Safe things. I felt a sudden kinship with that gazelle on the Discovery Channel—the one that tries to play it cool while mentally adding up whether the lion is far enough away.
Dylan didn’t look up when he spoke again. “Money is fine, but physics is real. Dollars are just something we cooked up a few hundred years ago so we didn’t spend our lives trying to figure out how to trade goats for medicine.”
“But I don’t know anything about physics,” I argued, “so it’s not that real to me. What’s real to me is finance. And marketing. And production. It’s a matter of perspective.”
“What is this, ‘my major is better than your major’?” His voice had a teasing note under the challenge. “Cause if it is, I’m going to win.”
“Mhmm. I didn’t say business was better. I just said it made more sense to me.”
I felt his eyes on me even though my back was turned. “But that’s the beautiful thing about science. It’s the backdrop of our experience. Gravity, light … you might not know all the formulas, but everyone gets it intuitively.”
I was skeptical. That was why I’d stopped taking science after grade ten. Somehow the numbers that were friendly when it came to accounting and economics became tricky when applied to weights and forces.
“I bet you I can teach you the first three chapters of this book in five minutes.” His voice was cocky. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Sure enough, he was watching me.
“Is engineering that easy? Maybe I should look into a transfer.” There were other dishes in the sink and I’d started on them since I was already there.
He fell silent for a moment and I figured he hadn’t heard me. Or he had gone back to studying. The water was running, and I put another clean dish on the mat beside the sink.
“Nice PJs.” I froze at the sound of his voice just behind me. Definitely not from the table.
Was he checking me out? It suddenly occurred to me that my outfit left too little to the imagination. I hadn’t planned on having an audience this morning. Especially a Dylan audience.
“Thanks,” I said, turning around. Dylan was standing just a foot away, holding his empty plate. He was gazing down at me with those big, brown eyes. I tried to hide the flare of awareness in my eyes but wasn’t fast enough.
His hair was getting too long. I wanted to push it out of his face.
Instead I grabbed the plate from his hand. Turned and added it to the pile in the sink.
“Tell you what. Five minutes,” Dylan stated from behind my back. He didn’t sound like he was in a hurry. “I’ll teach you physics. Consider it repaying the favor—I can teach you something for a change.” His voice was friendly. “Deal?”
“Knock yourself out.”
“You can keep doing the dishes. I’ll talk.”
“Whatever you say.” I needed to get out of there and start working. I could smell him, his shampoo and something all his own. Just the proximity was starting to melt away my resolve. Showing up unexpectedly before a girl had even had her coffee definitely wasn’t fighting fair.
“The first thing you should understand is friction.”
Placing another bowl on the mat beside me to dry, I glanced down and saw his hands appear on the counter on either side of my hips. The lion was definitely too close.
“It works better with a little demonstration. I have to admit, you’re the one who turned me on to this whole experimental method thing. I should thank you.”
I froze for a moment before forcing myself to continue. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he got to me. Wash faster.
“So here’s the thing. Frictional resistance happens when two objects are pressed together and moving in opposite directions.”
Dylan leaned into me, slowly, as if waiting for me to resist. I refused to move as his hard chest fit against my shoulders, but my traitorous heartrate spiked. He knew it, I could tell by the way his body tightened against mine. Slowly, his hips pressed into my lower back, and I could feel him growing hard against my spine. Holy shit.
This was the trouble with Dylan. Friendly Dylan would lull you into a false sense of complacency, then crazy-hot Dylan would club you over the head and drag you off before you even noticed anything had changed.
“Lex”—his mouth was close to my ear—“are you with me so far?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes.” No witty comebacks today. It wouldn’t have escaped him. But there was nothing to be done; my brain was a blank canvas.
“Friction’s proportionate to the force pushing the surfaces together, and also to the roughness of the surfaces.” His lips tickled my ear and I shivered. He must’ve felt it as his hands settled on my hips, harder than was comfortable. I thought he was going to just hold me there, but then he slowly turned me around to face him.
My wet hands gripped the sides of his shirt for balance. Because somehow standing on two feet was too hard.
Dylan didn’t seem to notice the fact that his shirt was soaked through in two spots. Hungry brown eyes devoured me as I looked up at him, helpless to do anything else. He was sexy as hell in a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The color set off his tan, his dark eyes and hair.
For once I could easily read his intentions. He was entirely focused on me, and that knowledge alone drove everything else from my mind.
His hands ran slowly up my sides, just under my tank top. I sucked in a breath at the fabric dragging along my flesh, the feel of his fingers grazing the sides of my breasts.
“So friction increases the more tightly the surfaces are pushed together.” Dylan pressed his hips into me, his hardness against my stomach. “And it reduces when the surfaces are smooth,” he murmured, running the backs of his finger
s along the underside of my breast. My eyes started to flutter closed as I drowned in sensation. I wondered vaguely if he was going to kiss me, but he seemed content to watch my reaction to his touch.
Damn he was good. My mind was quickly spinning off to dark and desperate places, Dylan’s seduction breaking me where I was weakest.
“C’mon, you promised me five minutes,” he reminded me, as if I was thinking of running. I opened my eyes. A boyish smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t chicken out on me now.” He knew me too well, knew I wouldn’t back down.
It wasn’t about physics. It wasn’t even about the lesson. He was betting he’d crack me. I was betting he wouldn’t.
The week of seeing me in the car, of texting me sweet and hot things, hadn’t worked. He had wanted to get me alone.
All of it made me want to resist, but even more so, it made me want him. Fiercely.
I shut my eyes to escape the intensity of his gaze. The past two weeks had been agonizing. I’d had no idea when I walked to his place that night, upset and pissed off, that one night would turn into this.
I’d slept with guys before and never had this reaction. I knew it wasn’t just me blowing things out of proportion. This was some other brand of madness. All I could think about was this complicated guy with the dark eyes and secrets.
When he squeezed my breast softly, my eyes flew open. His hips pressed harder into my stomach, eyes boring down into mine with an intensity that left me breathless.
“Hey, smart girl.”
I could feel it building, the fire inside me. Wondered how long I could keep it at bay. Realized it was way too late.
He and I knew it in the same moment: I’d lost. Dylan’s head angled and dropped to mine, a sound of satisfaction low in his throat.
His kiss contained all the hunger of the first time, and a possessiveness that was new. I knew with sudden certainty that he’d been thinking about this too.
I arched toward him, reveling in the feel of his mouth hard and demanding on mine.
