“You wanted honesty.”
His finger moves along my spine, tracing lazy circles through the thin fabric. My body reacts before my brain catches up. My pulse stumbles, my knees weak, and I have to steady myself against him, my palm pressed to his shoulder. He’s warm there, solid in a way that makes it hard to remember what I was angry about.
“You ever do anything halfway?” I ask, my voice quieter now.
“No.” His mouth almost touches my temple, his breath brushing across my skin, sending a shiver down my neck. “You?”
“Sometimes,” I whisper. “Depends on the risk.”
He turns me with a precision that shouldn’t feel as intimate as it does, his hand sliding briefly to my lower back before returning to the proper place, but that one second is enough to make heat crawl up the back of my neck.
“You handled yourself well tonight.”
I laugh quietly, glancing up at him through my lashes. “You mean at the table or when your ex-supposed-to-be-father-in-law tried to set you on fire?”
“Both.” His lips twitch, but only slightly.
The music shifts into something slower, darker, a rhythm meant for closeness. I can feel the faint brush of his thigh against mine with every step. I realize we’re not just moving anymore. We’re breathing together.
I tilt my head up, meeting his eyes for the first time since the fight. His pupils are darker now, his gaze steady but burning at the edges. “You don’t look shaken.”
“I can’t afford to.”
“That’s not the same as not being.”
He studies me for a moment, his eyes tracing my face like he’s memorizing it. His jaw flexes, his breathing slows. “You think you can read me that easily?”
“No,” I admit. “But I can tell when someone’s trying not to feel something.”
His fingers tighten slightly at my waist, just enough to make me lean closer without meaning to. “And what do you think I’m trying not to feel?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
The corners of his mouth shift—not a smile, more like surrender for half a second. “You’re trembling.”
“I’m not trembling.”
His gaze drops to where his hand rests on my back. “You are.”
He’s right. The tremor runs through me like static, from the place he touches all the way up my throat. “Maybe I should blame the alcohol.”
“Blame whoever you want,” he says. “But don’t pretend you don’t feel it.”
I want to be angry, but I can’t. He’s too close, too steady. His confidence fills every space around us until I have nowhere to stand that isn’t inside his gravity.
“Tell me more,” he says after a while, voice softer now. “About your brother.”
The question catches me off guard. “Lucas?”
He nods, eyes still on me. “You’re doing all this for him, after all.”
I look down at our hands as we move. “We used to be really close.”
“What changed?”
“Life,” I say after a pause. “And money. Mostly money.”
He doesn’t interrupt, just waits, the way people do when they actually want the truth.
