He reaches up, smooths one strand of hair back behind my ear, and the softness of the gesture makes the laugh die in my throat.
“Be a good girl,” he murmurs.
My pulse goes wild.
There are approximately ten thousand things wrong with how much I like that.
He doesn’t push me away.
Doesn’t drag me closer either.
Just leaves me there, suspended in the heat of my own bad decisions, his thumb resting lightly against my jaw.
I make a frustrated sound.
His eyes flash.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “You want me so badly, Stells.”
The problem with Tristan is that once in a while he says something in exactly the tone that bypasses every defense I have.
I lean in the last inch and kiss him.
Hard.
He lets me.
For half a heartbeat.
Then his hand slides into my hair and he kisses me back, and the world narrows to the taste of coffee and heat and the low groan that catches in his throat when I climb the rest of the way into his lap like the belt sign and good sense and basic public decency have all ceased to exist.
The kiss deepens fast.
His mouth is hot and controlled and devastating, like even now some part of him is choosing every angle, every pressure, every second he lets himself take. My hands grip his shoulders. One of his slides to my waist and holds there—firm enough to make me feel exactly how easily he could move me wherever he wanted.
He just doesn’t.
That’s what wrecks me.
Not the hunger.
The discipline inside it.
I kiss him again, deeper, until my lungs are burning and my whole body is tuned to one cruel, impossible fact: he wants me.
I can feel it.
In the tension locked through his thighs.
In the way his breath goes ragged when I bite his lower lip.
In the way his fingers flex against my waist like they’re arguing with themselves.
But he still does not touch any of the places in me aching hardest for him.
When he finally breaks the kiss, his forehead drops to mine.
Both of us breathing too hard.
