“Then you rinse.” He guides me to the final wash. “Get rid of anything that doesn't belong. Anything that might damage it later.”
The old hurts. The resentments and fear. The walls I built to keep him out. The walls he built when I pushed him away.
The water runs over our joined hands, over the paper, over the image of his face staring up at us through the chemical sheen.
“And then you hang it.” His voice has dropped to something barely audible. “Let it dry. Let it become what it was always meant to be.”
Us.
Finally, irreversibly, us.
We clip the print to the line together. It drips above us, while his hands linger on mine.
His heartbeat is still thrumming against my back.
“A-plus,” I whisper.
“I told you.” His lips brush the shell of my ear. “I remembereverything.”
I glance over my shoulder and really look at him for the first time since he walked in.
The impact knocks the breath from my lungs. In this light, at this distance, with this much want sparking between us, he’s almost more than my nervous system can process.
Impossibly dark eyes under the safelight. Jaw clenched. Chest heaving like every breath hurts.
“Sierra.” My name is a prayer. A warning. A question.
“Yes,” I answer, before he can ask.
His hand slides into my hair.
The grip isn't gentle. His fingers fist at my roots, pulling my head back until my throat is exposed, untilI'm looking up at him from below, vulnerable and wanting and completely at his mercy.
“I need you to be sure.” His voice is gravel and smoke. “Because once I start, I'm not stopping. Not until you're quivering and wrecked, not until your body understands what your fear never let you admit—how much I've missed you, Sierra. Every single day for eleven goddamn years.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sierra
I search his face,my eyes tracing over his mouth. The same energy hums through him as the night he kissed me like a punishment and blew this whole thing wide open again.
Cupping his jaw in my palm, I tilt his face down to mine, our noses barely touching as I stare deeply into his eyes. “What are you waiting for? Wreck me, Everett.”
There’s nothing soft about the kiss. Nothing careful. His mouth takes mine with eleven years of hunger behind it, his tongue sliding past my lips like he owns the right.
I moan into him, and the sound snaps whatever leash he’s been holding.
He spins me so I’m facing him. My back hits the counter, trays rattling, and then his hands are everywhere—under my shirt, palming my breasts, dragging down my sides with a possessiveness that makes my knees try to give.
“I’ve thought about this,” he growls, yanking myshirt over my head and tossing it somewhere into the dark. “Every night. What you’d taste like now. Whether you’d still make those sounds.”
His mouth finds my throat. Bites.
“Whether you’d still say my name like it’s the only word you know.”
“Everett—” I gasp, and his laugh against my skin is dark and satisfied.
“Exactly. Just like that.”
