A rush of affection took over, and my gaze lifted from his mouth to his eyes. “Am I your sweetheart?”
“Haven’t I made that obvious?” He ran his thumb along my lower lip, and a slight smile formed. “Better keep trying then.”
He dived onto my lips again, ramping up the passion, keeping it just shy of chaos.
The hand he’d slipped beneath my shirt swept around to the front, skimming the underside of my breast, trailing down to caress my clenched stomach. His touch left shivers in its wake. His tongue teased and taunted. All the while I clung to him and kept myself standing on trembling legs.
It took the slam of a door downstairs to pull us apart, and our breaths wrenched from us as we stared at each other.
“How are you two going up there?” Tim yelled, his voice ricocheting off the walls.
Theo covered my ears with both hands and shouted back, “Makinggreatprogress.”
With a shocked laugh, I shoved him off me.
“I don’t want to know what that means,” Tim called out. “It sounds dirty. Let me know if you find anything good.”
Theo palmed the back of my head as he calmed himself, his grin ridiculously appealing.
“Proud of yourself?” I asked, still panting.
He kissed me again, then looked me over. “You’ve changed from a cactus to a clingy koala, so yeah… I’m feeling pretty accomplished.”
“Good old Gav,” Theo said as we entered the last empty apartment on our floor.
Gavin Sturgess. Work-from-home IT specialist and part-time gamer. Sometimes, if the acoustics were just right, I could hear him shouting from across the hall—not in a rage, just… high-level excitement that seeped through the walls.
Theo carried another empty laundry basket, and I followed him inside, breathing in stale air and stillness.
“Woah.” My mouth parted, and I shot a glance at Theo. “He was a collector. A big time collector.”
“Is that surprising? All he ever talked about was tech stuff and comics.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, remembering the way he used to scoot past me and avoid eye contact. “He barely said a word to me.”
Figurines were lined up with meticulous precision on the floor-to-ceiling shelving dominating one wall of the lounge. Superheroes, villains, knights, horses. He’d arranged comic books on the bookcase below it, labels marking each shelf like his own personal library.
The care he’d taken tugged at something inside me, and I almost felt sorry for the abandoned objects without him here to care for them, each piece waiting for someone who’d never come home.
I shook my head and stared, struggling to match the obsessive neatness with the wild-haired, bushy-bearded guy who’d lived here.
“I’ll head into the kitchen,” Theo said. “Why don’t you do a sweep of the place? King Arthur’s sword might be stashed somewhere.”
With an amused huff, I wandered over to the wall.
Dust had settled on the shelves and shoulders of the figurines, but I didn’t dare touch anything out of respect. His prized possessions were organised in groups to keep the themes separate, and my eyes settled on the knights in chain-mail on horseback.
With Theo’s comment about King Arthur in the back of my mind, I turned and scanned the other walls, but the rest of the room was sparsely decorated. Leather couch. A couple of gaming posters and a chair that looked like it belonged in a racecar. Nothing interesting or useful.
I pushed my hair back from my eyes and locked onto the only other place I might find something. “I’ll check his bedroom,” I said. “He must keep his Renaissance costumes somewhere.”
“Gav would have loved knowing you were in his bedroom,” Theo said over his shoulder.
A smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. “I’d rather be in yours.”
He pinned me with a stare, putting a little heat into it and stirring my nerves. “Sadie.”
“Yes, I know. I’ll behave.” I left him before it could turn into something we didn’t have time for.
