let us eat cake!” She gave that last line a sing-song tone, another one of our mottos, actually.
While everyone huddled around the cake, I met Luke’s gaze. He returned it with a desperation in the back of those deep brown eyes—a deer in the headlights, sure. But even more prominent was the coal of simmering anger. Gulp.
Yesterday, he’d specifically asked me if I’d been overheard and I’d said no. Because as far as I knew, I hadn’t been. I’d taken all my usual measures to ensure privacy. Apparently that hadn’t been enough.
Faster than you could say “shotgun wedding,” we were being handed slices of white cake on non-eco-friendly plastic plates. They were decorated with yellow and pink flowers and scrolled I love you’s in gold on the edges. And people were handing us clear plastic cups of sparkling apple cider instead of champagne. “We’re at work. Much as it would be fun to hit the booze, maybe we’ll do that at happy hour on Friday,” Joel said.
Oh yeah. More fun than getting a tooth pulled. Egads.
The truly awkward moment, however, came a few minutes later as we all stood around forking the cake into our pie-holes and sharing coy glances at each other. Lucas never looked up once. And to be honest, I don’t think I’d ever seen someone shovel in cake that fast. He looked like he was trying to figure out a way to inhale it. Joel stood at his shoulder and had asked him a question, which only caused Lucas to shovel it in faster.
He was going to choke to death. Or give himself severe diabetes.
And either one of those possibilities would make me a widow. At the ripe age of twenty-six.
I opened my mouth to give him an excuse to leave, not even sure what I’d say. Maybe ask him to grab something out of my car for me.
Before I could, Warren was hitting the side of his plastic cup with his plastic fork. I frowned at this odd behavior as everyone else beamed at us with cakey mouths.
“You know what that means!” Joel chimed in, cheesy grin widening.
“I actually have no—” I began before being cut off by a bizarre chant that started faintly and grew.
“Kiss, kiss, kiss. KISS. KISS!”
Eww. No. “Gotta do it for good luck,” said Joel.
Now I was sure that I was the one with the deer-in-the-headlights look on my face as I turned to Lucas.
Woodenly he bent and pecked me on the cheek. His rough, whiskered cheek grazed mine and my heartbeat raced. He smelled… clean and subtle. Like soap and suede. Mmm. It was a good smell.
But our colleagues weren’t satisfied. “Dude,” another co-worker snarked at him. “Kiss her like you mean it.”
“I don’t do PDA,” Lucas snapped back.
“Me either,” I nodded vigorously. “I’m not the romantic type.”
Angie frowned. “But you’re in love, right? Why aren’t you wearing wedding rings or… just generally acting married? I mean, you say you’re not romantic, but you ran off and did a really romantic thing. I assume you went to Vegas over the weekend?”
I blinked, my mouth dropping. “I—we—yes, of course we’re in love!” I said, my eyes avoiding everyone else’s gaze. “We were just being impulsive. And we ordered rings online. They haven’t come in yet.”
Crapola. How did I get myself into these crackpot situations? Was the red hair a curse? Was I constantly going to pull a Lucy Ricardo—or Anne of Green Gables—because of some bizarre redhead curse?
With a blank face, Lucas set aside his plate and then turned to me. “Maybe just this once.” Before I could even figure out what he was doing, he hitched an arm around my waist and bent down to kiss me.
The minute our lips touched, everyone around us let out a whistle, or a cheer and applause. It was embarrassing as hell and I felt the heat in my cheeks, my neck… my lips. Okay maybe the heat in my lips was coming from contact with another set of lips. I could feel the rough around the edges where his whiskers from his perpetual scruff scratched me. That only added to the sensation flooding through me.
It felt like I was soaring down the steep part of a roller coaster at maximum speed, my breath catching, my heart sprinting, everything tingling. Everything feeling alive, straight down to the deepest parts of me. Heat formed there, boiled and roiled. His lips moved on mine and—holy crap. Was that his tongue?