Free How To Lose A Bachelor by Anna Banks Page A

the string holding everything together there, threatening to drive her mad. With his mouth, he opened her again and again with a kind of need she felt herself. With a kind of need she had never wanted to feel again.
    At least, not with Grant Drake.
    He lifted her from the ground to get better leverage, and all at once, a surge of applause resounded from around them. The crowd was cheering them on, clapping and whistling as if they were at a rodeo instead of a kissing booth. No, they were cheering him on. Grant was in complete control of this situation. And she wasn’t about to let that continue. If he wanted a kiss, she would give him one. Wrapping one of her legs around his thigh, she clutched him, clinging to him in a way that might not have been suitable for the viewers at home. This was, supposedly, a family show after all. She allowed herself an ample handful of his taut rear. They could edit that out if they wanted, as long as they captured his reaction to it.
    He groaned into her lips, grinding himself against her bikini bottoms. “My God,” he breathed against her mouth.
    And that was when she stopped it. She had won. But in a way, he had won, too. She’d promised herself that Grant would never get to kiss her like that anymore. He didn’t get to kiss her like this ever again. Yet there she was, attached to him like Velcro to carpet, drawing memories and feelings and pain to the surface. Not to mention something else she never expected, never dreamed she would feel again for him.
    Desire.
    Abruptly, she shoved him away, so hard that he stumbled a bit before catching his footing. For several long moments, she struggled to catch her breath, taking small satisfaction in the fact that he was doing the same. The roar of their small festival audience had heightened to a deafening clamor. In her panic, she’d almost forgotten about them. About the crew. About America.
    Omigod .
    Mortification settled over her as she looked at the camera, which was still focused directly on her face. Heat burned her swollen lips and seared her cheeks and seemed to spread like lava down her body. “Cut!” she screamed. “Cut!”
    Chris Legend wriggled his way to the front of the crew. “That’s a wrap,” he said, visibly amused.
    “That is not going on air,” Rochelle informed him.
    “Oh, yes, it is,” Chris said. “It’s the juiciest footage we’ve gotten all day.”
    She lunged then, but Grant caught her before she was able to get her hands around Chris’s neck. Still, the show host looked a bit pale. Good—it was smart for him to acknowledge the very real danger he was almost in.
    “We both agreed to this,” Grant whispered in her ear, holding her in an impenetrable bear hug. Since when did he get so strong? “We both agreed that we’d play this game.”
    “We don’t have to play this game,” she hissed. Slowly, he let her slide down the length of him. “You could just vote me off.”
    He laughed, a loud, cruel sound that startled the people around him. “Not in a million years.”

Chapter Ten
    T onight’s Friendship Ceremony would be easy for Grant. There would be no more back and forth about whether or not he should let Rochelle off the hook, whether or not he should hand her the bouquet of sweet peas and let her be on her conniving way.
    The kiss this afternoon at the festival changed everything.
    He would never let her go again. Not ever.
    Even though she showed up to tonight’s ceremony wearing hideous flannel pajamas and wet hair. Even though she gave him the death glare during his monologue for the sake of building tension on camera. Even though she faked a coughing attack in the middle of the take in a blatant attempt to be excused.
    They still had something. There was still something that happened when their lips touched. Nothing as cheesy as a jolt or a spark. No, it was deeper than that, always had been. It was a craving, long-denied. An insatiable yearning, a hole that could never be filled no