Semua Bab Miss Goody Two Shoes : Bab 71 - Bab 80

"Okay, how do I look?” Cole turned away from the mirror over the sink and struck a pose. Harper's expression was carefully neutral. “Honestly? Like a kid in her mom's dress.” The post-telethon dinner was black tie for men and blue dress for women and she didn’t have the right kit, so she'd borrowed Harper's. Not completely grasping the impact of Harper being six foot four and an athlete. When she was pretty much the opposite of that. “What if I rolled the sleeves up?” “Don’t you fucking dare. That’s my best dress.” As Cole walked across the room, the dress felt baggy. Harper winced. “Do you really want to meet important alumni looking like that?” “It’s not that bad.” Her hair was having a small rebellion of its own. She'd quiffed six ways to Sunday but the whole thing had fallen sideways like a drunk on Saturday night. But fuck it. Aiden Crux wasn’t coming anyway. Not because of a single conv

Especially if it was slutty or degrading. Cole turned around, trying to shut down the porno in her brain. They were in a public place, and she was fully dressed (in several layers of formal wear as it happened), but it felt vulnerable. Giving this man, this stranger, her back. Her trust. His arm came around her from behind. And the heat of it, the pressure. The tightening muscles of his forearm made her a bit delirious. She leaned back and his body was right there, all hard planes and angular curves for her to nestle into. She tilted her hips, wriggling her arse until she was tucked in against him, pinned and protected at the same time, at once safe and overwhelmed. She tried to breathe and an excited little moan happened instead. Aiden tugged her in tighter still. No humiliatingly inappropriate noises from him. But his heart was thudding hard and fast against her spine. A finger touched her lightly under the chin and she tipped her head back

“On the contrary, that’s achieved through hard work. Passion is a hindrance to business.” “But you must be pretty driven? Otherwise we’d all be billionaires instead of people with Twitter accounts.” “Perhaps. Though I think I would call that resolve.” “What kind of headline is that? ‘Aiden Crux: Mildly Inclined to Succeed.’ How are they supposed to write you up in the Arrow now?” “They’re not. I don’t give interviews to school magazines.” Cole couldn’t quite suppress a giggle at that. The Book of Making You Feel Bad About Yourself was meant to be taken very seriously indeed. “And besides,” he went on, “attaining success is considerably more than a mild inclination for me.” Cole realized then how easily he wore his wealth. How naturally power became him. “I can’t imagine you growing up on the wrong side of the tracks.” “Everything I have, everything I’ve done, is mine and mine alone.” He didn’t sound proud of it, though. Just sad. “But

It was as though she had been waiting for him all along…except, well, he hadn’t. He stood by the crenellations, looking out at the city, which was all shadows and spires and streams of golden traffic in the distance. Cliché or not, he looked good by moonlight. Sculpted in silver and steel, a man so coldly perfect he was barely real at all.Maybe it was some essential contrariness but his very untouchability made her want to…touch. To spark his beauty to life with passion and surrender. He lifted a hand, bringing a cigarette to his mouth. He was briefly illuminated by a flare of amber and then he tilted his head back, eyes falling closed as he exhaled a sinuous plume of smoke into the darkness. And God, his face like that. Open in pleasure. The suddenly undeniable sensuality of his parted lips. Cole must have been staring at him like a cartoon American cop at a doughnut because, at that moment, his eyes snapped open and she had never seen anyone shut dow

But he didn’t react at all, the silence getting deeper and heavier all around them, while he just stood there, a creature of stone, starlight, and secrets. And then he said, “No, he wouldn’t.” It wasn’t the words, but the terrible certainty of them.Completely broke Cole's heart. It just seemed impossible to her that Aiden Crux could believe something like that. And she needed—with this terrible sense of helplessness, or perhaps what Hilary Rupert Baskerville would call hubris—to make it better. To remind him who he was: someone magnificent and rare and deserving of all the pride in the world. She reached out, wanting to comfort him, to bridge the spaces between them—the chasm of their lives—with touch. “Don’t.” He caught her by the wrist, fingers as cool and implacable as steel. Cole was sure, on his part, it was nothing more than the desire to stop her doing something he didn’t want. And while she had tastes, she wasn’t so co