This was the boy I’d forgotten for so long he’d become a man.
He was the reason I was even sitting here right now, across from him, in this stuffy booth on a cold January afternoon.
He was better than I’d ever be, and it seemed so effortless for him. The muscles in his forearms shifted beneath his skin, the veins on the back of his hands drawing my focus, the tendons rising with the movement.
I never thought I’d find veins and tendons sexy, but right now I wanted to lick and bite my way across every inch of his flesh. A sudden annoyance flared—he was holding the violin so lovingly, this lifeless instrument getting to feel his fingers and how they moved.
Those hands had made me come. They weremine. Forme.
I wanted to grab his violin and throw it aside, slip between his parted thighs and watch those fingers curl over the waistband of my pants and slowly slide them down, to wrap themselves around my hard cock and squeeze, to grab my hip and?—
“Reese?”
I dragged my eyes up to Dakota’s. He’d stopped playing, and so had I, and I wasn’t sure when that had happened or how long I’d been sitting there staring at his hands and fantasizing about him touching me.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, setting his violin and bow on the seat next to him. He stood up and started moving toward me, and I made some kind of sound in my throat.
“Nothing, I just spaced out for a second—hey! What are you doing?” I cried when he plucked my violin and bow from myhands and set them gently on the empty seat beside me. He crouched in front of me, wrapping his fingers around the legs of my chair. My legs were spread open, and the whole thing felt obscene. My groin was a foot away from his face, and was he going to do something? Touch me? Was that why he came over here? To slide those big, gorgeous hands up my thighs and squeeze? To?—
“I’ve been worried about you for days, and when I finally get to see you again, you’ve got a bruise on your face,” Dakota said. His voice was rough and thick and deep, and there was a seriousness in his expression that ate at my heart. “I’m sorry if what I said upset you, if I’m the reason you’ve been gone, if you feel like you can’t even be in your own room. I know I’m a lot, but I—” Something pained crept across his face, and he clenched his jaw.
I jumped when he suddenly laid his head on my thigh, sucking in a sharp breath as he rubbed his face against my leg.
“I’m sorry, Reese,” he whispered. “I just can’t stop thinking about you.”
I lifted my hand, hovering over his head. It was shaking above him, and I didn’t want to watch it tremble any longer, so I set it on his head and threaded my fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes and groaned, like it was a relief to have me touch him like this.
He was so distraught, and I couldn’t let him stay that way. I had no idea when he’d come to care about my well-being so much, or even why, but…in this moment, I couldn’t let him keep feeling like this if I had the power to make it stop.
“Dakota,” I said softly, sifting his hair through my fingers. He turned his face and looked up at me, and I couldn’t help moving my hand down until I was able to brush my thumb underneath his left eye over the two big freckles there.
He was so damn pretty.
“You’re not the reason I stayed away, okay? And I’m the one who should be sorry. Nobody hurt me, I just—” Heat spread across my chest and burned up my face. “I just walked into a door frame,” I mumbled. “I swear.”
“Are you hurt anywhere else?” Dakota asked softly. I stared into his eyes, an overwhelming surge of emotions crashing violently through me.
And in that moment, for whatever reason, the tiger lily he’d laid on my pillow popped into my head.
A knot in my chest twisted painfully.
No one had ever gotten me a flower before. No one had ever paid as much attention to me as Dakota did, and?—
“No,” I managed to say, even though my throat felt like it was closing up. “Just my face.”
For once, I’d told him the truth.
I wasn’t sure why I was protecting my heart so hard when it was just a shriveled up, rotten thing lying half-dead in my chest. There really wasn’t much worth protecting anymore.
“Okay.” He rubbed his thumb under my eye and held me captive in his gaze. I thought maybe he was seeing through every single lie, peering over every wall, looking past all the bullshit I’d put in place because right now I felt stripped.
Naked and vulnerable and?—
And what scared me the most was that all I wanted was for someone to hold me.
Him. I wantedhimto hold me.
A horrible sound bubbled up from deep inside me, a terrible, wretched thing that scraped up my throat and clawed its way out of my mouth. He looked panicked for a split second, and it was funny to me that my tears were sending him into a panic. A laugh broke through the awful sound coming out of me, and god, I sounded as crazy as I felt.
