Briggs - A Carolina Reapers Nove - Samantha Whiskey Page 0,19

for kiddie p—"

“I wasn’t a baby! I was seventeen!” she shouted.

“Exactly!” I grabbed the shirt I’d come with from the couch and yanked it on. “All it would have taken was one fucking sentence—two words from your lips, and none of it would have happened!”

“Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I’ve felt guilty every day since Cross told me he traded you? I had no idea who you were, Cormac! Just that you were some insanely beautiful guy who looked at me like I wasn’t some damaged teenager who needed therapy after losing her parents. Forgive me if I wanted to live in that moment a little longer.”

“It’s not like I knew who you were, either!” My stomach sank as the words tumbled out of my mouth. The truth of the matter was that she’d been a reckless teenager, and I hadn’t been smart enough to bluntly ask her age. We’d both been foolish. At least she had her age as justification for her idiocy. I’d just been...what? Blinded by a seventeen-year-old? Yes.

“I know I sure as hell liked you a lot more then than I do now!” she snapped.

I stalked forward, and she backed up until her ass hit the table, holding her breath while I reached around her to grab my keys. “That’s the difference, Duchess.” I whispered, my lips brushing the shell of her ear. She shivered as I pulled away slowly. “I grew up. I changed. You’re still the same spoiled little girl from the pool room.”

She sucked in a breath like I’d wounded her.

I headed for the door.

“You have no idea who I am now!” she called after me.

I turned in the doorway, taking in the way she’d wrapped her arms around her waist like she needed to be held together. Don’t fall for it. “I know that a woman who had truly learned from the mistake of hiding her age with a man she claimed to like would have been open about who she was before having that same man sign a contract four years later.”

Her mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. “I was helping you!”

“Yeah, keep telling yourself that. See you in New York, Duchess. No need to beckon—I’ll be on time.” I muttered a curse as I walked away from Bristol twice in the same number of days. I deserved a fucking award.

“Oh yeah! Well, your shirt is on backward, jackass!” she shouted down the hall after me.

I ignored every wide-eyed assistant and just kept going.

It wasn’t lost on me that the next time we’d be in close quarters, it would be on her turf. But I sure as hell wasn’t playing by her rules.

6

Bristol

“You know, I’m starting to wonder if all these fittings are just a way for you to see me again,” Cormac said, his tone practically a tease compared to our last conversation.

More like all-out battle. God, I was still fuming from that argument and it had been two weeks.

“You’re flattering yourself,” I said, shaking my head as I watched Angela take his chest measurement for the sixth time. “And if you’d stop packing on the muscle, I wouldn’t have to continue to do this.”

Cormac cocked a brow at me from the platform he stood on. “I haven’t since the last time you measured me—”

“Not true,” I cut him off. “Your chest increased a quarter of an inch.”

He gave me a wtf look.

I shrugged, pushing off the wall I’d leaned against since they started. “It does matter,” I answered his unspoken question. I walked around him in a slow circle, flashing Angela a smile as she continued with her work.

I couldn’t stop the heat pulsing in my veins that landed somewhere between anger and lust. Couldn’t stop the ache that wrenched deep in my core every time I looked at him. It had been two weeks since our angry and yet mind-blowing kiss at Scythe—and the fight that followed the day after. And even though I knew it had stemmed from the tension of our argument, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.

His kiss had tasted better than I remembered, but he had the same effect on me as he had four years ago. Cormac Briggs was the definition of electric chaos and maddening intensity. With one brush of his lips, he’d stolen my breath. With a gentle sweep of his hand over my skin, he’d turned me liquid. He was infuriatingly addicting, and all my fantasies had never compared to getting a taste