SIXTEEN
CLARA
Morning camein slow and hazy, seeping through the thin curtains in a pale wash of light that turned my ceiling into a watercolor.
For a few seconds I didn’t know why my chest felt tight or why my body already buzzed like I’d woken mid-fall.
Then my brain caught up.
Wes’s hand on my cheek. The rough drag of his thumb at my face. His breath, warm and close. The half inch between us that never quite disappeared, even after we did.
My eyes slammed shut again.
Oh god.
Heat rolled through me so fast it was almost dizzying. Every place he’d almost touched felt lit up in neon. My skin remembered the way his body had leaned in, how he’d braced one hand on the counter behind me and crowded my space like something in him had snapped.
We hadn’t actually kissed, but that didn’t seem to matter to the rest of me.
My nipples tightened under the thin cotton of my sleep shirt, pebbling hard enough that the fabric rasped when I shifted. My hand moved, palm flattening over my breast like I could smooththe feeling away. A sharp pulse of pleasure shot through me instead, low and insistent.
“Jesus,” I muttered into my pillow.
The sound came out more like a broken sigh than a prayer.
I tried to breathe past it and reroute my thoughts to literally anything else. Grocery lists. Shot lists. Bridal gowns. A million other lists that didn’t involve the way Wes Vaughn had looked at my mouth like he was starving.
My body wasn’t interested in grocery lists.
It replayed last night in jerky little flashes, like an old film stuttering on a projector.
His fingers brushing mine at the sink. The way his touch had branded the small of my back. The heat in his eyes when he’d murmured,I meant it, Duchess.His thumb on my cheekbone, careful and somehow reverent.
My thighs pressed together, chasing pressure. I curled onto my side, dragging a pillow between my knees, trying to ease the ache and only making it worse. A tiny, helpless sound slipped out of me before I could catch it, halfway between a moan and a curse.
I shoved my face deeper into the pillow to smother it.
This is ridiculous.
Wes Vaughn had nearly kissed me in his kitchen, with my brother’s name in both of our histories and an engagement ring still glittering on my finger.
I almost let him.
My hand slipped lower on autopilot, not quite touching anything I was willing to name, just skimming my ribs, gliding over my stomach, fingertips tucking into the waistband of my shorts before I yanked them back like the elastic had burned me.
“Absolutely not,” I whispered into the pillow, as if my body would listen if I made it a rule. “Nope. We are not ... doing this.”
My pulse thudded between my legs anyway, steady and traitorous.
He was your brother’s best friend.
He almost kissed you.
You almostbeggedhim to.
My mind tried to rebrand it as nothing. It was proximity, that was all. Too much shared air, too much awkwardness, too much relief that he’d sat at the table instead of disappearing back into the couch. Two lonely people in a quiet house with a decent meal between them and way too many unspoken things.
My body called bullshit.
