"Okay?" he murmurs.
"Yes." My voice comes out steady. "Sorry. I'm fine."
He holds my gaze for another second, searching, making sure, and then he stands and steps back and I miss his hand the second it leaves my face.
I am so completely and utterly screwed.
"Right." Rafael's voice is softer than usual, his earlier cheerfulness dialed down. "Where’s my room at?"
"There's a room at the end of the hall," Enzo says without looking away from me.
"Perfect." Rafael picks up his bag and disappears upstairs and his footsteps move down the hall, then a door closes.
Silence.
Just me and Enzo and the dying fire and this thing between us that I don't have a name for anymore.
I stand up before he can say anything, before he can look at me like that for one more second with those careful eyes that see too much.
"I'm going to bed."
CHAPTER TWELVE
ENZO
I watch her go.
I can't do anything else, can't look away, can't make myself move from where I'm standing as she climbs the stairs with her shoulders straight and her chin up and that quiet dignity she always carries. Her footsteps are soft on the wood and then there's the sound of a door closing upstairs and then nothing.
Silence.
My fingers are still tingling where I touched her face.
I stare at my hand like it belongs to someone else, like I can't quite reconcile the thing I just did with the man I've been telling myself I am. Five seconds. That's all it was. My palm against her jaw, my thumb on her cheekbone, and she came back to herselflike she'd been waiting for exactly that, like my hands were the thing her nervous system had been searching for.
I want to follow her upstairs.
The want is so specific and so violent that it takes everything I have to stay exactly where I am. I want to climb those stairs and push open that door and pull her against me and keep her there until morning, until she stops shaking, until whatever look was in her eyes goes away completely.
Instead, I press my fist against the arm of the couch until my knuckles ache.
The pain helps. Barely.
My cock is still hard. Has been since that hallway, since the towel and the moonlight and her breath hitching against my lips, and sitting here while she's upstairs in my shirt in my bed is its own specific kind of hell. Every muscle in my body is wound so tight I feel like I'm going to snap, and the worst part is there's nowhere to put it, no way to burn it off, nothing to do except sit here and suffer through it.
"So."
Rafael's voice from the entrance to the living room. Easy and unhurried, like he didn't just watch me cup Isabella Romano's face in my hands while she looked at me like I was the only solid thing in the room.
"Don't." My voice comes out flat.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
He walks to the armchair, sits, crossing one ankle over his knee, completely relaxed in the way only Rafe ever manages to be.
"This is getting fucking ridiculous, Enzo."
