You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me Read Online Free Page B

who looked like Max and had glamorous jobs and were on first-name terms with WAGs didn’t kiss girls like her. ‘You want to kiss me?’ she asked tremulously.
    ‘Well, it will be a nice ending when I tell little Tommy the story of how we first met,’ Max said, and Neve wasn’t just smiling, she was giggling, even though, as a rule, she didn’t giggle. ‘The question is, do I kiss you here or at your front door after I’ve walked you home and just before you invite me in for a coffee?’
    Neve frowned. This whole situation was running away from her. She was just starting to get the hang of light flirtation and now Max had raced ahead to kissing and … ‘For a coffee?’
    ‘Are we really doing this?’ Max sounded exasperated. ‘Not for a coffee. For this.’
    His hands were out of his pockets and around her waist before Neve had time to blink or pull in her tummy. All she could do was watch Max’s face get nearer and nearer. The kiss was inevitable but she still thought she was imagining it when Max’s lips brushed against hers.
    Neve didn’t pull away, but she didn’t move closer; she just stayed absolutely statue-still to see where this was going to lead.
    ‘I love your red lipstick,’ Max murmured, as if they were already alone in her flat and not standing outside a tube station with the wind whistling around them and discarded take-away containers and fag ends at their feet. ‘It’s so sexy.’
    Neve knew it was just a line to get into her knickers, though if Max could see the firm-control reality of them, then he’d have wished he hadn’t bothered, she thought sadly. She opened her mouth to say something, to tell Max the red lipstick was just false advertising, supplied by Celia, but her words got lost when Max lifted his thumb to her mouth and slowly and deliberately wiped it away.
    ‘What did you do that for?’ Neve touched her fingers to her lips, which were tingling as if he’d been kissing her for hours.
    ‘Because I want to kiss you again and I don’t think red’s my colour. I usually go for the pinker shades,’ Max said, and Neve wondered how many girls he’d practised on before the right words came tumbling out of his mouth without him even having to think about it. He’d undoubtedly kissed a lot of women, really knew what he was doing, so why not treat this whole confusing encounter as an educational experience?
    ‘Well, go on then,’ she said in what she hoped was a challenging tone. ‘Kiss me if you want to.’
    This time Neve was ready, tilting her head back as Max cupped her cheek and slowly kissed her. Just his lips on her lips, nothing more than friction, but it sent a thousand sparks shooting down her arms and legs so Neve was flexing her fingers and trying to curl her toes in her too-tight shoes. It was only her third ever kiss. There’d been an horrific collision with her second cousin’s tongue at a wedding where she’d also got drunk for the first time, and there’d been the dreadlocked Philosophy student who may or may not have taken her virginity, and that was after she’d consumed a huge number of fudge brownies, which she’d later discovered had been heavily laced with marijuana. They barely counted. Whereas this was stellar kissing, the kind of kissing that she’d only read about in the lurid bodice-rippers she’d sneaked from her grandmother’s bookshelves.
    Neve did what any self-respecting Regency heroine would do and wound her arms around Max’s neck with a rapturous little sigh so the kisses could get deeper, more heated, and they only stopped when someone across the street bellowed, ‘Get a fucking room!’
    Her hat had fallen off in all the excitement. Max crouched down to pick it up, as Neve tried to get her breathing under control. She really had to try to be more blasé about this.
    ‘So, what do you think?’ Max asked as he placed the hat back on Neve’s head, pulling it over her eyes and grinning when she scowled and adjusted it. ‘Back