Fuck.
He was getting to me.
“I wanted to build a strong, healthy body. I built a strong, healthy body, and I maintain it.”
He sure does, Dreamer cooed.
“I wanted to be starting tackle on my college football team,” he carried on. “I worked my ass off and made starting tackle my sophomore year.”
Oh shit.
I was sensing where this was going, and it was scaring the dickens out of me.
“I wanted to make detective after three years,” he continued. “I made detective. I wanted a place on the Nightingale team, and trust me, being blood to a partner with a stake in that business did not get me a pass. It made it harder because I had to prove to the others I wasn’t a family hire. And they do not fuck around with training. We function as a unit, and if you don’t hold up your part, you’re out. I worked with a partner on the force. The force on the whole is a team. But I have not been trained extensively like Cap, Knox, Shaw and Landon have to do my part to keep my brothers alive. They came in instinctively knowing what their role was. I had to prove I could learn it and then do it.”
Okay…
Ummmm…
Yikes.
“And I did,” he went on. “In case you aren’t following, I not only do not shy away from a challenge, I actively seek them. Not one thing in this life is worth it if you don’t have to put in the work to earn it. So keep going, baby, because the more you try to keep me out even knowing you’ve already let me in, the harder I’ll work to show you what you’ll get when you get me.”
“I have not let you in,” I denied. “I’m just trying not to let this escalate to me being a bitch like last time.”
“Willow,” he whispered, him saying my name in that tone something I knew to my marrow I’d remember until my dying day, “you curled into my side last night and said, ‘Goodnight, Gabe.’”
I closed my eyes.
I did that.
I totally did that.
I tried to pretend I didn’t, to the point, in the waning throes of taco-and-beer-infused denial, I totally lied to myself that I didn’t know how he got there.
But I did that.
He kept at me.
“And you pressed into me this morning knowing exactly who you were pressing that sweet body to.”
Damn.
I did that too.
I opened my eyes.
“You can lie to yourself,” he went on. “You can lie to me. You can fight this. Fuck, I want you to fight it. But we both know, you are not gonna win.”
I opened my mouth.
But he used his hands on my head to tilt it, and his mouth came down on mine.
He gave me a strong, delicious stroke of his tongue that rent a strong, delicious pulse through my body.
Then he let me go, grabbed the cupcakes, put them in my hands, opened the back door, nabbed the sheet cake, slammed the door, and balancing it in one hand, he put the other to my back and guided me to my latest payday.
I didn’t make a peep.
