My tongue plunders her mouth. Lark’s fist tightens in my shirt. The glass clutched in my hand is in danger of being crushed to dust or thrown over the balcony. I’m desperate to mold her flesh in my palms, but I settle for laying one hand to the side of her neck instead. The second my palm touches her skin, she whimpers with need. My erection is painful against my zipper as she presses her body against mine.
Our teeth clash. The kiss grows brutal. Within seconds, Lark has ripped through any restraint I thought I had. She kisses me with the kind of fevered desperation that makes me feel not just wanted. Or needed. It’s as though she craves me. She grips onto the back of my neck as though she’ll fall apart if she doesn’t hold on. When she sucks in a breath, she dives deeper, towing me into the dark with her. Every time I think I’ve gotten control of the kiss, she tears it from me. With a touch. With a bite or a suck or a moan.
Lark’s tongue sweeps over mine and then she pulls away, taking my bottom lip with her before she lets it slide from between her teeth, her bite the perfect balance between pain and pleasure.
“Lark …”
Her breathy laugh eradicates any thoughts of whatever plea I was about to make. She trails a line of open-mouthed kisses along my jaw. My fingers thread into her golden waves when she nips at my earlobe hard enough that I hiss. I tighten my hold on the strands in my grasp and she moans, her mouth dropping to my neck where she sucks on my inked flesh.
A growl rips free of my chest as I grip her hair. “Feckin’ Christ Jesus,” I groan.
Her lips go still on my pulse.
… Shit.
I immediately loosen the fist tangled in her locks. Did I do something wrong? Something definitely seems wrong. It’s obvious in the way she stiffens.
“What did you say?” she whispers, her breath hot on my skin.
Fuck. Fuck.
What did I do? Was it the whole thou shalt not use the Lord’s name in vain business? Maybe Lark is super religious. I can’t remember if she or Sloane mentioned if the boarding school was some strict Catholic thing. Nuns. Were there nuns?
I swallow. “Uh, I said ‘feckin’ Christ Jesus.’”
“Growlier,” Lark snaps.
“Feckin’ Christ Jesus.”
There’s a single heartbeat of stillness in the world.
And then Lark has backed away out of reach, the heat of her body gone, a chill left behind on my skin. Both of her hands cover her mouth but they can’t mask the shock in her eyes.
Shock and … fury.
“Oh my fucking God,” she hisses into her fingers.
“What …? Was it the Jesus?”
“No. No, it was not ‘the Jesus,’” she says with air quotes and a sneer as she leans close enough to jab a single finger into my chest. “It was ‘the Batman.’ The Budget Batman.”
Lark takes a step back. Crosses her arms. Raises a single brow.
My eyes narrow to thin slits. The words come out as a venomous hiss when I say, “Blunder Barbie.”
“Oh. My. God. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod,” Lark says, flapping her hands like she’s trying to get any residue of me off of her. “You had your tongue in my mouth.”
“I’d hate to remind us both, Blunder Barbie, but you kissed me.”
“And you let me. You fucking knew it was me.”
“Clearly, I did not, or I would have taken my chances with the fire escape.”
“There is no fire escape.”
“Pre-feckin’-cisely.”
Lark rolls her eyes before they sharpen on me in a lethal glare. “You are such a liar. You were all up in my face that night. With a flashlight. One that you smacked on my head.”
“Your face was plastered with makeup. And I didn’t smack—”
“My concussed head. Where I needed fucking stitches which I never got because I had to walk home, thankyouverymuch. And then you growled at me like some rabid trash panda that was about to gnaw my leg off and tossed me in the trunk of your car, you fucking psycho.”
“Oh I’m a feckin’ psycho, am I? You’re the one who jumped from a moving vehicle after you rammed some poor bloke into a lake and then fake teared up when I dropped his blimmin’ body at your feet. And they weren’t even good fake tears. They were sarcasm tears,” I snarl. I take a step closer and bend to meet her eye level, dabbing my eyes as I clear my throat for my best candy-sweet vocal impression. “Boo-hoo, I’m Blunder Barbie and I just feckin’ killed a man. My bad. But don’t worry, I’ll just get someone else to fix it so I can toddle on back to my perfect little life.”
“That is the biggest pile of hypocritical bullshit I’ve ever heard. How’s the contract killer gig going, by the way? Raking in some good cash with your murder-scuba skills, Batman?” Lark snorts and steps toward me, drawing a giant circle in front of my face with a dainty finger. “What you think you know about me, or anything, frankly, is this,” she says as she continues the circle. “But what you actually know is this.” She stops abruptly to hold her finger and thumb close together, only a whisper of space between them.
“What I actually know is that you’re a huge pain in the arse.”
“And what I actually know is that you’re a monumental douchebag.” She lets out an exasperated sigh. “Is this some kind of cruel joke? Why would you let me kiss you, you fucking nutcase?”
“Like I said, I didn’t feckin’ recognize you. It was Halloween, for Chrissakes. You were in a costume. With makeup. Thick makeup.”
Her jaw drops. Then closes. Then drops again. “Seriously?” When I don’t reply, she balls her fists at her sides, and I find myself wishing she would try to throw a punch just so I could have the satisfaction of catching all her fury in my calloused palm. “You are unbelievable. You were wearing a full-on mask and I recognized you by your grumble whisper and ass-backwards Christ Jesus–ing. All I had on that night was some white face paint and colored eye shadow. Hardly the same thing as your thrifted superhero disguise.”
Deciding it’s time to throw her off-kilter, I shrug and lean against the railing. My sudden nonchalance seems to infuriate her as much as I’d hoped, so I take a long sip of my drink before I give her the truth. “It was dark. I wasn’t wearing my glasses.”
“Your glasses,” she parrots after an incredulous snort. “Forgive me, dickhead, but that sounds like complete bullshit.”
“Forgiven. Well, for that, anyway.”
“You’re not wearing them now.”
“Highly observant of you, duchess. It’s probably all well and good too. I imagine you’d be ripping them off my face to smash them underfoot, am I right?” When I narrow my glare at her, Lark smirks, unable to hide her agreement. “Maybe now is a good time to inform you that you got me into so much shit at work. Or have you forgotten the part where you managed to single-handedly decimate a very important contract for my employer? You have no idea the shit my boss has put me through.”
“Me? You think it was me who fucked your contract?” she shrieks. “First of all, I did no such thing. But I can’t help it if rumors of your abysmal customer service skills worked their way back to your employer. Deserved. You were being a dick. Even your friend Conor agreed.”
Goddammit, Conor.He should know better than to give out his name. A low growl escapes my throat and a feckin’ demonic little grin creeps across Lark’s face. Oh, her dart hit the target and she knows it.
My foreboding expression doesn’t seem to scare her, not even when I lean a little closer. “This is not the kind of industry where you demand to see the manager and leave a shitty review, princess.”
One perfect brow flies up. Her smile stretches and her eyes glitter in the dim light. “Oh, it’s not?” she says, her voice saccharine. She saunters closer, one slow step after the next. “Because it certainly sounds like that’s exactly how your industry works, and you’re butthurt about being called out for acting like a prick. You’ve decided to take it out on me under the erroneous assumption that I’m the one who got you into trouble, instead of you looking in the mirror and giving yourself a stern talking-to.”
Lark stops so close to me that my chest will touch hers if I take a deep breath. Her eyes drop to my lips and linger there. Heat tingles on my flesh. I can still taste her kiss, the sweetness of soda on her lips. I don’t take my eyes from her face as she touches my sternum and walks two fingers toward my neck.
“Erroneous assumptions are kind of your forte, aren’t they? But this time I guess it’s just the consequences of your actions coming back to haunt you, sweetie.”
I catch her hand in a tight grip and guffaw a laugh. Even with its vicious edge, this still feels like the first true moment of delight that I’ve had in a long while. Well, at least since the kiss we just shared, though that particular event now seems like it happened to another man. “That is precisely the kind of oblivious, hypocritical horse shite I expected to come from someone like you.”
There’s a flash of hurt in her blue eyes, more fleeting than a lightning strike. “‘Someone like me’? You have no fucking idea who I am or what I know about consequences.”
The rage on her face is fuel. I want to find every one of her buttons and hammer them until she blows, just to see what she’ll do next. But this time, she doesn’t push back. Instead, her spine straightens. Her chin tips up. She slips her fingers free of my fist with a swift tug. I fight the strange urge to pull her back closer to me. I’m unsteady. Unmoored. Like I’ve been hit by a rogue wave and lost my balance. But I shove the feeling away.
Lark gestures to the glass door. “That is my best friend in there,” she says, her voice low and menacing, her eyes pinned on me. “And she deserves to celebrate with the love of her life. Your brother.” Lark’s face scrunches as though she just tasted something bitter. In an instant, she’s smoothed her mask out again and takes a step closer. “So I’m going to be nice to you. For her. And you can continue being whatever scowling, smirking, asshat jerkoff you want, but you’re not getting anything more from me.”
Without so much as a blink, she whips the drink from my hand and downs it. Her eyes water as soon as the liquor hits her tongue.
“Thought you didn’t drink, duchess,” I say with a smirk.
“I guess your stimulating company has that effect,” Lark retorts before shoving the glass against my chest, nothing more than chips of ice left behind. “And fuck off with the ‘duchess’ shit. That bitch has met the guillotine.”