Which was not supposed to be possible.
It waseverylevel of wrong,everyprotocol violation, everything impossible.Again.
And then... his heart stuttered.
Because there she was. Standing in the center of a room that hadn’t existed a second ago, one she’d crafted herself out of memory or desire or something else entirely. It was warm. Lit by candlelight, but no candle was burning. And she was wearing...fuck. No. No, nope. Absolutely not.
She was wearing a black teddy. Lace. Strategically see-through in exactly all the beautiful wrong ways. He actually forgot how to breathe. He didn’t need to anyway. He needed to stare at her nipples way, way more. Look at them, they would feel amazing in his mouth.
He’d spent so much time ignoring her in a physical way, avoiding the curve of her neck when she stretched, how she tapped her finger on her lip when she was thinking. The way her jeans fit her perfect ass when she shelved books. Her breasts. Those big breasts. Even the sound of her fucking voice when she got snippy with idiots in the nonfiction aisle made him salivate.
He was so careful.
He had to be careful.
But now... this?
He was already fucking up the whole operation without addinghaving the hots for herto the list of professional screw-ups.
And yet, here they were, and she was looking at him through those long lashes, eyes dark and endless and full of something dangerous. A promise, a need, something deeper than lust and mightier than longing. Those full lips parted, soft and ready, inviting him in. No words spoken, but the command was clear:Take. Take. Take.
His breath stuttered in his throat, his brain lagged behind while his mind buffered, frozen between the rules he lived by and the gravity of her pulling him deeper into a place he was never meant to enter. Because he couldn’t be here. This couldn’t be happening, but it was as real as the night before, when she’d sat beside him in her car, exhausted and guarded.
This was another part of her, one she’d managed to hide from him so completely. In here, she was unfiltered, unaware of the lines she was destroying with every step.
She reached for his hand.
Heshould’vepulled back.
Instead, her fingers laced through his, anchoring him inside a space that shouldn’t hold him, and she stepped backward. One slow, deliberate step. Then another. Her gaze never left his until her knees hit a bed that hadn’t been there a breath ago.
The dream was building itself around herdesire.
Aroundhim.
And then, for the love of everything that was wrong, she stepped up to him. Her palm skimmed his chest, slow and open, up to his shoulder, then higher, fingertips brushing the back of his neck. And when she pulled him down and her mouth claimed his, he let it happen.
Sweet. She was so sweet. Warm. And the taste of her on his tongue was something he hadn’t known he’d craved. Something impossible that rewired the very concept of want. He was dizzy, maybe a little drunk on her, on this. On the scent of her skin and the sheer wrongness of it all that somehow felt right.
He plunged his hands into her hair, tilting her head to deepen the kiss, to have more. Her lips parted with a moan, and her body pressed into his like she couldn’t bear even an inch of space between them. Her breasts crushed against his chest, full and heavy and begging for his touch. He reached without thinking, filled his hand with one, feeling the heat of her through the lace, the weight of it in his palm.
The sound she made hit him like a weapon, fired straight from her throat to his cock, lighting him up like some fucked-up string of Christmas lights. He growled, low and wrecked, grabbed her hips and ground her against him, lost himself in the pressure, the heat, the devastating realness of her when nothing at all was real.
She rocked into him, then reached between them with steady fingers and unbuttoned his jeans to slide a hand inside.
His hiss and her hum of pleasure came at the same time.
When she guided his hand into her underwear, when his fingers slid against soaked silk and the wet heat of her, he nearly lost it right there. She was so wet, so ready, it hurt him. It stripped him of every line, every law, every rule he had ever followed and left him with only one possible way to exist: buried inside her until he couldn’t tell where he ended, and she began.
He pushed her gently back onto the mattress that was absolutely a lie like everything else in this goddamn place and followed her down, stretching beside her, mouth never leaving hers, fingers soaked with her arousal.
She arched into him, one leg sliding between his, her fingers digging into his arm like she needed to anchor herself.
He was gone, too far gone to care.
The voice came out of nowhere, out of the nothingness that surrounded the bed, thick and menacing and wrong.
Why do you have to be so fucking difficult?
