I take one step closer. She doesn’t back away.
The air tightens, like the pause before a storm. Her breath trembles. Mine does too.
“Dahlia,” I rasp, her name thick on my tongue.
“Yeah?”
“If I were smarter, I’d stop.”
“Smarter is overrated.”
It’s all invitation, no command. Her voice barely a whisper, but it wrecks me.
My hand rises, brushes a strand of hair from her face. She leans into it, eyes closing. For a heartbeat, the world shrinks to the space between us—her soft exhale, my pulse roaring in my ears.
I move slow, remembering everything about this moment. The softness of her breath on my cheek. The part of her thick, pink lips. The warmth blazing beneath my palm as my mouth sinks into hers.
She chuckles, and I inch back, eyeing her.
“Your beard,” she says. “It tickles.”
I hesitate, not sure what she means. If it’s good or bad. She doesn’t let me think long, arms threading around my neck and into my hair as she strains up on her tiptoes, kissing me back.
She smells like honey and tastes like sin, soft lips moving against mine. Reawakening things that have been dead so long, I didn’t think they still existed. Her lips part on a sigh, and I sweep into her mouth.
My arms clamp around her, drawing her hard against me, and she doesn’t shrink away. Instead, she pulls me closer, hands gripping my neck, fingers sliding into my beard. Sparks ignite at every touch, pure incineration against the backdrop of the candlelit cabin.
My hands rove, learning the shape of her body, how it feels under my touch. Shoulders, waist, hips. I freeze, not wanting to push too far, dangerously close to crossing a line neither of us can come back from. Instead, I raise my hands back to her face, palm her cheeks. Angling her head, I deepen the kiss until I don’t know where I end and she begins.
Honey and pine mixing, heating each other from the inside out. “Want you,” I whisper, trying hard to maintain control.
“I want you, too,” she says, voice trembling. But then, it hits me like a freight train. Scars. The limp. The noises and images that still wake me at night. I’m broken, have nothing to give her.
“But…” I turn away, pacing. “I can’t do this.”
“What?” she steps forward, face incredulous.
“Can’t claim something that’s not mine,” I grit out between clenched teeth.
“But—”
“No. I’m supposed to give you a safe place to stay. Help you fix your cabin. Not take advantage of you.”
“You’re not taking?—”
She’s not listening to me. Not giving me the out I need. “Gotta check something,” I mutter and step over the threshold, shutting the door against her and disappearing into the black night. Cold air knifes through me, sharper than guilt.
I don’t stay outside for long. It’s no practical proposition. But I need space to sort things out. Untangle what’s going on in my head and my heart.
When I return to the cabin, Dahlia’s nowhere to be found. I inch the bedroom door open, see her sleeping mound in a glint of light from the hallway.
I’m an ass. Proved it tonight. Pacing back into the living room, I stay by the fire, staring into the flames. My chest aches, full of something I can’t name.
Solitude is no longer enough. I want more. But how do I be enough for Dahlia?
Chapter
Eight
