“That woman didn’t deserve to be shoved off her stool because she leaned against you,” I tell him, frowning. “I know she was flirting with you, but shoving her off her stool would have been extreme.”
“I wasn’t feeling reasonable at the time. My feelings for you are not reasonable, Juniper. If your next question is whether they ever will be, I doubt it.”
I make a face, looking away. “I nearly shoved a woman talking to Callum at the hotel.”
They took me to the party to humiliate me. It still hurts to think about it.
“We wanted to hurt you,” he admits quietly, and I lift my head, surprised. “Callum wanted to make you jealous, and we wanted to hurt you for selling out to his dad and betraying us.”
“I didn’t betray you,” I bite out.
“If any of us had thought to use our brains, we’d have worked that out a long time ago. Someone smarter pointed that out to me.”
“Who?”
He shakes his head, a faint smile curving his lips. “It’s not important right now. But I like him more than I thought I would.”
I marvel over the fact none of my scent matches are behaving the way I thought they would.
“What?” he asks.
“You keep surprising me.”
“How?”
“Your honesty. By saying things that don’t make me want to throw objects at your head. And I was prepared to. It’s why we’re having this conversation in the kitchen within easy grabbing distance of the apples in my fruit bowl.”
Maybe Lucia is rubbing off on me more than I realize.
“Here.” He leans forward to nudge the bowl of fruit closer to me, then he takes my hand and lifts it to brush a kiss across my knuckles.
I think he meant it to be a casual thing. Just a way of convincing me I could throw whatever object at his head if I wanted to, and he wouldn’t care.
But a kiss that shouldn’t mean anything at all to me does something to my brain.
Not my brain.
To the place inside me that wants him as much as a part of me always has. The part that’s been telling me the bond between us never broke, and it is still alive and kicking.
That kiss does something to him as well.
His grip tightens around my hand, and as my breath hitches, a muscle in his jaw ticks.
We stare at each other across the tiny two-person dining set, and none of us breathes.
He swallows so hard I track the slow action down from his mouth, his jaw, and the bobbing of his Adam's apple.
“Do you want me to go, Juniper?” he asks, voice soft.
It’s my turn to take a long breath, even as I continue to hold his gaze. “No.”
I don’t know who moves first.
If I cared enough to track the moment that we stopped sitting opposite each other at the table and wound up pressed flush together, doing a slow backward walk to my bed, then I would know. But I don’t care to know. It’s happening and that’s all I let myself think about.
Everything is slow.Deliberate. From his lips on mine, the clothes he strips off my body and then his own. His hands caressing every inch of me…
His mouth between my legs.
