“Just what?” Suddenly, he was right there, his chest pressed against mine, leaning down, his lips so close if I stuck my tongue out I could taste him.
I closed my eyes and stretched up to meet him, a whispertumbling out of me a split second before I kissed him. “Baby, I just want to feel.”
I woke with a start, but without the racing pulse I’d become accustomed to in the last twelve months. My face was pressed into clean cotton, and a softly worn duvet was bunched at my waist. The darkness was punctuated by a familiar glow from the streetlamp outside the wide bay window.
Shit.
I’dknocked out in Luke’s bed.
I sat up, expecting to be alone. The sight of him stretched out beside me caught me off guard. My heart stuttered. He was fast asleep. Peaceful and perfectly still. Angelic. The years fell away and I was drawn to him like a moth to a flame, even as my head screamed at me to cut and run. I trailed a finger over his cheekbone, revelling in the way his quiet breathshitched, and brushed a stray lock of his hair back from his face. My thumb itched to trace his lips, but I didn’t dare. Luke was a light sleeper.
Besides, touching his lips would remind me of his kiss, and then I’d never leave.
“I should go.”
“Come upstairs with me.”
“No.”
Yet somehow, here I was, naked and sleepy in his bed, my limbs aching in all the right ways.
I gasped.“Harder.”
“Yeah?” Luke’s grip on me tightened, and he slammed into me with more force. “Like that?”
“God, yes. Like that.”
Heat rippled through me. We’d gone from kissing in the kitchen to fucking on his bed in the time it had taken me to compute that kissing him was every bit as dangerous as I’d feared it would be. But it had been hard to care as he’d flipped me onto my stomach andfucked me while I’d lain prone and screaming his name. I’d come so hard I’d clearly fallen into some kind of coma, and I wasstill in Luke’s bed.
Perspective returned to me like a cold punch to the gut. I let my hand fall from Luke’s face and rolled away, slipping out of bed and creeping from the room, collecting my clothes as I went. My jeans were on the stairs, my bra on the kitchen counter.More flashbacks of the frenzy that had carried us to the bedroom hit me, and I knew I needed to get out before I traipsed back upstairs for another round.
God, I was a fool. Luke had given me exactly what I’d demanded of him, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted it again and again, but I had nothing to offer in return. Nothing but resentment and mixed messages. Because while the bitterness I’d carriedfor so long remained, I couldn’t deny the flutter in my heart.
He’d got to me, and I’d let him.
I drove home in a daze, dreaming of being back in Luke’s clean-scented bed. Regrets danced in the periphery of my mind, but they were weak, and so was I. Weak for his kiss, his touch, and the way he commanded my body with gentle hands, even when he’d pinned me so tight I could barely breathe.He was an addiction I’d run all the way to France to escape, a voice in my head I’d married a deceitful bastard to silence. And yet here I was doing the drive of shame at four a.m.
Gus was waiting for me on the doorstep, phone clutched in his big hand, worry etched on his handsome face. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“None of your business.”
“It is my businesswhen I’m up all night thinking you’re dead.”
I dropped my keys on the counter. “Why on earth would you think that?”
He stared at me like I’d grown horns. “What have you even been doing to be out this late?”
“Same thing as you.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth, but that had always been my problem: thinking out loud. Saying the first thing that came into myhead, usually the truth, before my conscience had a chance to edit.
Gus’s face screwed up in a bewildered frown. “I doubt you’ve been doing what I’ve been doing.”
“Why’s that?” I turned away.
He grabbed my arm. “Seriously? You went out to hook up?”
