The Things She Says by Kat Cantrell Page A

Right?”
    Nodding, she stifled the urge to scream at him to shut up and let her have her fantasy for a while longer. “Of course. I proved you suppress your passions, just like Lord Ravenwood, so I win.”
    He grinned, and her heart grew a little heavier. All the inconvenience of her misinterpreting that kiss as something meaningful was alleviated.
    She couldn’t be too upset. This was her fault, after all, for leaping into deep water without a floaty.
    But provoking Kris into boiling over had been too easy to resist. A man more in denial didn’t exist.
    “So,” he said. “Does that mean I get to move on to stage five?”
    “If you want to,” she said nonchalantly, though this whole game of romance instruction had become a lot less fun now that she’d unlocked him. Every sinfully delicious bit of that stormy passion called to her, and she wanted badly to answer.
    But not badly enough to let him love her and leave her. “I figured we were done since I proved my point.”
    Something sizzled through his expression, but with the dark shield of his sunglasses in place, she couldn’t interpret it. She’d rather he hadn’t put them back on.
    “Not by half,” he said.
    Pain stabbed at the backs of her eyes. So he wanted to play, as long as she didn’t read too much into it. Was she completely crazy to consider it?
    Yes. She was crazy. Except she knew he’d been trying to tell her something without telling her when he hinted the engagement wasn’t exactly typical. He’d deflected the question about whether he’d ever been in love far too fast. His heart was buried underneath layers of cynicism and Hollywood.
    What if she could uncover it?
    Oh, how she wanted to, wanted all of him. The taste of that untamed kiss still blasted the roof of her mouth. If she had any hope of moving past flirtation, any hope of guiding him away from the weird engagement, any hope of claiming all that passion for her very own, stage five was the key.
    “Then we better get started.” She grasped his proffered hand. “Stage five is very tricky.”

Six
    T he interior of the Ferrari was the perfect temperature to bake a cobbler in less than ten minutes, and the heat smacked VJ the moment she slid into the passenger seat. “Hurry with the air conditioner.”
    Kris dropped into his seat and hit the ignition. The sun wasn’t the only thing heating up the interior. But it was the one she could reasonably handle at the moment. Cool air washed over her as he drove out of Lively and onto the freeway toward Dallas.
    “Music?” he asked.
    “Not the sexy stuff. Something else.” She couldn’t take the thrum of Spanish guitars right now. Here in this exotic, European car, surrounded by unimaginable luxury and privilege intrinsic to people in Kris’s stratosphere, her resolve didn’t feel so...resolved.
    An upbeat tune sailed out of the speakers, and he immediately turned it down so it was atmospheric background noise.
    “So, stage five,” she said. “It’s emotion.”
    “I was hoping it was sex.”
    Of course he was. No surprise after she threw herself at him on the Ferris wheel.
    Sex echoed in her mind and triggered visions of what might have happened if the Ferris wheel hadn’t rotated at the very worst time.
    Best time. Best time.
    “That’s because you’re thinking like a guy.”
    “Yeah. I’m sort of bound by the equipment God gave me.”
    “That’s why I’m here. To help you think with something other than your equipment.”
    His laugh crossed her eyes. There was something really powerful about making a man like Kris laugh. Especially because it was all she had to keep her warm at night, when it came down to it.
    She could pretend all day long that stage five was the key, but in reality, unsophisticated VJ Lewis might need a million stages to crack Kristian Demetrious. She had about the same ability to decipher his instruction manual as she did the one for his car. Zero.
    “I’ll keep that in mind. So, emotion?”
    The