“Oh, and Penn?”
“Yeah?”
“Next time you bleed all over the page, at least let me bring the bandages.”
The door clicks shut, leaving me alone with sunlight and silence — too bright, too loud, too honest.
The cursor blinks.
And I start typing.
Dane’s name pressed against the inside of my skull like a bruise touched too often tender, dark, impossible to ignore. Not just the memory of him, but the way helookedat me. Like I was a secret worth keeping. Like he knew every bent page of my wreckage and still chose to read on.
Blake used to have a way with words too. Used to make my body sing, used to make me believe it was love. But Dane?
Dane didn’t need lyrics. He spoke in movements. In touches that rewired me. Hands that told truths I wasn’t brave enough to write, and a voice that wrapped around my name, the one he’d given me.
Peach.
An endearment dripping with heat and sweetness and something dangerously close to devotion. A blasphemy. A blessing. A sin I’d let him commit again and again if he asked.
“Peach.”
His voice cracked through the office quiet like thunder rolling through a church. Holy in its own kind of wrong.
I jolted, clutching my chest as my chair spun away from the window’s indifferent light. “Shit.”
“Scare ya?”
There it was that smirk. All confidence and mischief, smug and stupidly devastating like he hadn’t just pulled me back from freefall.
“Yes. You did.”
“You were thinking about me,” he said, leaning against my doorframe like a man carved from careless temptation. “Me and my naked ass in the shower this morning.”
He waggled his brows.
My cheeks detonated. Heat crawling up my neck like a confession. I darted a look over his shoulder, praying the office wasn’t listening. He laughed rich and uncontained, like sin that had never learned to apologise.
“Relax, Peach. You’re wound up tighter than a damn watch.”
He dropped a stack of mail on my desk with a thud. My heart plummeted. On top: An envelope. Blake’s handwriting.
My ribcage squeezed. My throat locked.
“It’s from him, isn’t it?” Dane’s voice dippedno longer teasing. Grounded. Rough. Protective in a way that stripped me bare.
I nodded. Couldn’t speak. A tear slid down my cheek, then another, then anotherlike they had been waiting for permission.
“Peach…” he murmured, eyes flicking toward the open office. So much glass. So little mercy.
I felt transparent. Exposed.Breakable.
He reached for my hand, thumb stroking over the tremble in my fingers like he could press the pain out through touch. “I’m here. It’s okay. Look at me.”
He crouched beside my chair, elbows braced on his knees, eyes locked onto mine.
“You’re not spiralling again, are you? Because if you are, I swear I’ll carry your ass outta here and straight to my place where you and I could hide from this whole place and the asshole that taunts you.”
