leaned forward and planted both hands on the flat arms of the chair. The tips of her fingers brushed the insides of his elbows. His only move was to reach up and remove his glasses.
She angled in closer, lifted one hand and touched a finger to his cheek. “I want you to do something for me.”
Leo raised a brow. In the background, an anonymous hand clapped to Eric’s mouth muffled a smart remark. Macy gathered her wits and her courage and climbed into Leo’s long-legged lap.
“I want you to smile. Can you do that? Can you smile for me, Leo Redding?”
Moving even nearer, she twisted around and settled her seat in the natural dip of his thighs, draped her legs over the arm of the chair, her elbow crooked around his shoulders.
He smelled wonderfully warm and male, and she snuggled up to his body, which felt…oh, he felt like nothing she’d ever known.
His legs beneath her bottom were hard. His belly at her hip was hard. The muscles across his shoulders were solid and hard beneath her forearm. Even the hand, the very large hand resting on her shins, was a study in masculine strength.
Lips parted in seductive invitation, she stroked an index finger over Leo’s cheek and shivered at the prickle of evening beard. She trailed the same finger down a path to his collar, worked loose the knot on his tie.
“C’mon, Leo. I know you can smile. You’ve got all the right muscles.” She toyed with the top button of his shirt, poking the bare tip of her finger beneath the placket to his collarbone.
Still no response. Nada. Nothing. Ignoring the murmurs of the audience, she whispered directly into his ear. “I’ll make it easy on you. A quick grin and we’ll call it a night.”
She pulled back to look at his face, expecting a gradual capitulation. But no, he was stoic to the core. It was time to get down and dirty.
Pouting always worked for Chloe, so Macy gave it a try at the same time she lightly touched her thumb to the edge of Leo’s mouth, drawing the corner upward.
No reaction. Macy held back a scream.
She plied her final weapon, running her fingertips in feathery movements over his tightly drawn lips, begging, with her mouth only inches away, “One smile. Please?”
And then she felt it. A shift. A change. A flare and a flash in Leo’s eyes, and a new sense of his body hardening beneath hers.
A part of her wanted to extricate herself from both his lap and a situation as awkward as any she could recall sharing with a man. A part of her wanted to wiggle, to experience and explore this private intimacy.
She managed, instead, to sit very still and avoid disclosing to the rest of the room what was now so impressively, so solidly pressed to the back of her thighs.
Leo reached for her wrist, removed her motionless fingers from his lips. She blinked slowly and smiled, a smile meant for Leo only, Leo alone. She wanted him to know that, between the two of them, they’d get out of this with no bloodshed, go on to live another day.
And then the man blew the wind from her sails.
He smiled.
Not a humorless grin. Not a slight curl of his lip. Not a sneer or a snarl, but an ear-to-ear, start-my-heart-beating smile. Yet that wasn’t the worst part. The best part. The worst. Because once he’d released her wrist and she’d made ready to hop up from the chair, he cupped the back of her head.
And he kissed her.
Oh, hallelujah, the man could kiss. He tasted like beer and smoky barbecue and a man aroused, and she was starving. She couldn’t get enough when he teased her mouth with the tip of his tongue, rubbed his lips softly, then roughly, over hers.
It was a complicated kiss, meant for show and to prove that he was not relinquishing the win. Mentally, she fought back. Physically, she surrendered.
Desire took full advantage, reaching between her legs to remind her how long it had been, how good it could be. Oh, this wasn’t supposed to happen.
She silently grimaced and broke the kiss—to cheers and applause and ear-piercing whistles. She pulled back far enough to meet Leo’s gaze.
His mouth was slightly reddened and still smiling. But his eyes sparkled with fireworks that were less a celebration and more a signal of an incoming salvo.
Hey, now. She wasn’t the one who’d done all the kissing, much less the one who’d started it. The seduction she’d admit to, and she was willing to be a big girl and swallow her medicine. But she would not take all of the blame.
She shoved a hand back through her hair and kept her voice low when she said, “I’d say that makes me the winner.”
Leo chuckled—a sound deep in his chest that rumbled through his muscles, through his bones and into Macy’s body. “The winner? You’re kidding, right?”
Hmm. That wasn’t what she’d expected. “Why would you think I’m kidding? I got what I wanted, didn’t I? You did smile.”
“No. You got what I let you have.” His smile had totally vanished. “I got what I wanted.”
Is that so, Mr. Hotshot, Esquire? “And what was it that you wanted?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Macy’s subtle shift of weight prompted a convincing surge of pressure beneath her thighs. “Yes. It is. Quite obvious, as a matter of fact.”
Holding his gaze, she waited until the gleam in his own turned smug. She would never let this man have the last word—or the upper hand—again. No matter how strong the physical pull heightening every one of her senses.
With a pat delivered to the center of his chest, Macy hopped off the hot seat. “Unfortunately, Leo, the obvious isn’t…well, much of a challenge, if you know what I mean. Sorry, but I just don’t think I’m interested.”
Watching Leo’s startled disbelief fade into grudging respect, Macy turned quickly, lest the moment be spoiled.
No sense wondering if her fleeting triumph was worth the promise of retribution she’d just seen in his eyes.
THE FAJITAS WERE HISTORY and the conversation had returned to a low drone by the time Leo Redding recovered. He didn’t think he’d given up such an inappropriate hard-on his entire adult life.
And Macy Webb wasn’t even his type. His reaction had to be rooted, so to speak, in that very contradiction. She wasn’t what he was used to, so in effect, he was responding to the mystery of the unknown.
She had this mass of unruly hair, a dark caramel-brown color, streaked to vanilla cream on either side of her face. It was short, hitting her neck between the base of her skull and her shoulders and causing a riot around her heart-shaped face. Last year, when he’d seen her that first time in his office, he’d thought she’d been working on dreadlocks.
But tonight his fingers had slid through the strands without hitting a single snarl. The entire wild-child look was one-hundred-percent natural. He hadn’t expected that, any more than he’d expected her eyes to be so clear,
