Because she was special. That was all he knew.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “But . . . only if you want me. Because you’ve known me a very long time, and you’ve never seemed the least bit interested, and then I went and opened my big mouth the other day at the table, and now I have basically made myself as pathetic as possible and begged you. . . .”
“You didn’t beg,” he said. “You sent signals, and I responded to them. I’m a pretty hardheaded man, Lydia. And it has suited me to think of you as my best friend’s much younger sister for a very long time. But you’re a woman. You’re not a girl. Regardless of how I’ve liked to think of you.”
“When did that change?”
“I can’t really say when. There have been shifts over time. I started really noticing how beautiful you are . . . as a woman, recently.”
“Is that the same as wanting?”
Right then, in this house, sitting so close to her, it felt the same as breathing. Essential. He couldn’t remember not wanting her—that was the strangest part of this conversation. He couldn’t remember what it was like to want anyone else.
“I can’t stand the thought of another man touching you. Not first. Haven’t I been there for you?”
“Yes.”
“Going to be there for you this way too. If you want it.”
“I want,” she said. “Have I said anything that’s been ambiguous? It’s you that I’m worried about. I don’t want pity sex. I don’t want you to have sex with me because I am Matthew’s weird little sister and—”
He silenced her with a kiss. He silenced her with all the passion pent up inside him, and what really terrified him in that moment was how right it felt. Because it was one thing to be aroused, and it was quite another to feel replete, with a sense that he was home. The same sort of feeling he’d gotten when he’d pulled up to the house today and seen the porch light on, when he had come up to this room, that was the feeling that flooded him now. With her mouth on his.
Home.
Safe and precarious all at once. Wonderful and aching.
“Are you still questioning me?”
She shook her head, her eyes wide.
“So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to try and go back downstairs without looking like we’ve been making out.” Because this was the danger. He loved the Clay family more than anything, and he would never have sex with Lydia simply because he wanted a woman, but he knew how the hell it would seem to her family.
They wouldn’t understand this feeling.
This feeling of . . . responsibility that he felt for her pleasure, for her happiness.
And hell, he wouldn’t want to get into it with any of them. Because this was between Lydia and him. This was theirs.
Sacred in that way.
“I can do that,” she said, her voice trembling.
“I’ll bring down my box of stuff.”
“I was supposed to change.”
“No. Keep that dress on.”
Because he was going to take it off later.
If that made him a terrible person, then he supposed he was just going to have to accept going to hell.
Because tonight he was going to take Lydia Clay to heaven.
Of that he was certain.
Chapter 8
