Instead of play-fighting with her, he picked up her hand and kissed the salty tips of her fingers. She stared at him, her eyes visible in the light from the screen. Had they been in the very back row, he’d have kissed her, but since they weren’t, he smiled and leaned in to whisper, “Round five?”

He felt her jerk… before she whispered back, “Forty minutes to end of movie. Ten to shake everyone off. Twenty to make it to your place.”

His cock pulsed.

Their plans, however, were thwarted by a sudden group enthusiasm for Chinese food after the movie. No way to cut and run without being rude as hell—and also scuppering his chances of winning over her girlfriends.

So it was that Danny had to eat Chinese food while his brain plied him with erotic internal movies of a naked Catie undulating underneath him—or on top of him. He wasn’t fussy, liked her every which way.

But sexual frustration aside, he had a great time. Catie’s friends were good people—hardly surprising, given who she was as a person. And they seemed to like him back, which made him relax in a way that was dangerous for all that it implied. If this was a fleeting thing, then it didn’t matter if Catie’s friends liked him.

It matters now.

After that firm admonition to the part of him that was beginning to panic at the idea of this ending as fast as it had begun, he dug into the food. Laveni, Catie’s BFF since always, had made sure to be seated next to him at the round table, and she asked him several pointed questions under the cover of the conversation.

He managed to wriggle around most of them with responses that betrayed nothing private. But her last one made him realize the other woman had figured out the truth, knew that their relationship was nowhere close to fake.

He went motionless.

“You know she’s wonderful, right?” Veni said, her eyes huge and dark brown in a gently rounded face under a mass of black curls and her skin the same shade as Danny’s.

“Catie,” Veni continued, “drove an hour and a half through heavy rain one night to pick me up after I finally left my abusive shit of a boyfriend and found myself out on the street with a backpack and no money.”

Danny didn’t offer sympathy because her tone said she didn’t want it; she’d clearly moved on from that point in time, had only brought it up to make her point. “I know,” he said, his eyes going to Catie. “She’s fucking amazing, and I knew that even when I was an asshole kid.”