Re: Mean-Eyed Cat: Cat & Reece E
That grin of hers unfurled the way ivy choked the trunk of a tree in slow-climb. Life throttled away, fed by sun and rain. Reece eyed the aforementioned smile, velvet seduction, with suspicion. Yesterday, he would have allowed himself to believe it wasn't meant to place him at the butt of a joke. He would have smiled back. He likely would have blushed. But now he knew he was a fiddle and Cat was a ...fiddler. Uh, by which I mean, she played him like that was what he made for. All that back and forth on the forums and Reece thought nothing of it. But, she was using it to get to him, to his papers, and, with or without emeralds dripping in finery around her throat, he found he didn't much like her.—To be sure, backstabbing was a daily activity at Tethys. It was as routine as email. But, that was the corporate world. Reece didn't realize that if he truly was like the people he admired, he would backstab everywhere, and not just behind plexiglass doors. No. He thought he'd made the transition smoothly, unaware that his being taken off-guard by this woman proved him wrong on that count.
Cat's eyes had the same languidness her smile had, the same seductiveness Reece knew now came with a knife between the ribs. He glared at green in blue-and-amber before he tossed back the whiskey with the same simple movement of arm, and hand to lips.—The alcohol went down easy and warm, and, for once, Reece--For once, he didn't even gag.
He wiped his lips with the back of his hand and he made himself look away from the way she licked whiskey from her own lips in soft smack and smirk. He glared at the shot glasses as they were refilled, only looking up when the woman pouring stood straighter and allowed her fingers to skate across the mouth of her glass.—The man's expression opened in surprise when she mentioned the facility—something that was supposed to be very, very, very secret, and he did a bad job of covering up that surprise, even after taking that second shot that left a looser feeling in the back of his head than the first. (He had less blood than a normal man his size, okay? It was the--the arm. Or lack thereof. The lack of human arm. That needed blood. Okay, anyway.)
He sniffed, placing palms to the lip of the bar as Cat leaned heavily against it in sinew beneath her casual shirt. Reece shook his head, bottom lip pouted out, to tell her: "I don't know about... I don't know about simple. Because, uh, you'd need a facility first. And there isn't one." He cleared his throat and met her gaze, held it.