“Yeah,” he agreed quietly. “It is.”
He didn’t move toward me.
I hated that. Hated that he was giving me space when all I could remember was the way he once pressed me into a canvas wall and took it away.
My hands curled into fists. “Then why are you here?”
“You invited me,” he said. “Room 481, remember?”
“That was a moment of temporary insanity.”
His gaze swept over my face, my throat, the soft cotton tank I’d thrown on that clung in places I wished it didn’t. “Are you sane now?”
“Not even a little,” I said.
We stood, the silence between us thick and alive. The last of my excuses fluttered uselessly in my head. I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t lonely in the desert. I wasn’t high on adrenaline from incoming mortar fire.
I was just a woman in a hotel room with the one person I had sworn I would never let touch me again.
And I wanted him so badly I could taste it.
He took a slow step closer. Then another. Patient, like he was approaching something wounded and cornered.
“Say no,” he murmured. “And I’ll leave.”
I knew he meant it.
That was the worst part.
“I hate you,” I said, because it was easier than admitting anything else.
His jaw tightened. “You’re allowed.”
“I hate what you did. I hate what you took from me. I hate that you think you get to show up here and ask for anything.”
“I didn’t ask,” he said. “I offered. There’s a difference.”
My chest felt too tight. “I hate that my body doesn’t give a damn about the difference.”
His eyes flared.
There it was—the crack in his control.
“Emerson,” he said, voice rough.
The sound of my name, that tone—it scraped something raw and hungry inside me.
“Don’t,” I whispered. “Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you remember what it sounded like when I—” My voice broke. I swallowed the rest.
We stared at each other, every argument hanging unsaid.
Then I closed the distance.
I grabbed the front of his T-shirt and yanked him down, my mouth crashing into his like I was trying to punish us both. The kiss hit like an explosion—heat and teeth and fury, his hands coming up hard to catch my waist, my back, pulling me flush.
