No matter what goes through my head right now, I can’t find a single piece of me that regrets this kiss.
With my hand still in her hair, I gently tug, letting my lips find the tender skin below her ear. My lips dance across the skin of her neck, my tongue flicking out to taste her.
I can’t get enough of her.
I push her up against the counter, kissing her neck softly. She lets out these little noises of pleasure, and I just want to hear more of them.
The hand on her waist slips up under her shirt. She tenses before she pulls away. And just like that, the moment is broken.
“Sloane?” I whisper, trying to pull her back to me.
“We shouldn’t have done that.”
She turns and goes back to mixing whatever it is that she’s making. It looks like a chocolate chip cookie.
“I’m sorry…” The words slide past my tongue and into the air, but they feel bitter. I’m not sorry. Not really, anyway.
I reach out and touch her arm, but she pulls away from me.
That stings. A lot more than I want to admit.
Instead of reaching out to her again and forcing her to talk to me, I let my arm drop to my side and take a step back from her.
“I’m going to bed.”
“Night.” Her voice is soft, and it kills me that she won’t even look at me as she says it. My jaw clenches, but I turn and head towards the stairs.
The next morning, Briar sits in my office waiting for me. The sight of him douses me in a bucket of frigid water, reminding me of the reality of our situation.
My house guest is his daughter. His twenty-one-year-old daughter. That I kissed last night. That I’m not sure I would have stopped if she hadn’t pulled away.
The guilt sets in as he sits there across from me, completely oblivious, as we talk about the case that I had been working on last night before I got distracted.
“Are you even listening to me right now?” Briar snaps at me, bringing me from my thoughts and back into the present.
“Not really,” I admit, running a hand through my hair.
“And why not?”
“Because I have a lot on my mind.”
He stares at me like he doesn’t believe me. Like he couldn’t possibly understand what’s so much more important than this case, all of a sudden.
I don’t blame him; my job has been my whole life for a long time, especially in the last few years. There’s not much else I let myself have time for. Maybe it’s selfish of me to be thinking about his daughter when he’s sitting right here next to me, while there are all these victims’ families who want justice, who need answers.
Of course, I’m fucking selfish. I can never just have one minute to myself.
“Sorry, what were you saying?” I ask, forcing myself to focus back on the task at hand. He looks at me for a few seconds like he wants to say something, but decides against it.
“Anyways, I was saying that the prosecution is supposedly bringing in a piece of evidence that they got from a very reputable source.”
I lean back in my chair, trying to focus on him. But right now, while I look at him, all I can see isher. All I can feel is her lips on mine, her body pressed against mine, her hands pulling me closer.
I blink and let out a breath, picking up a random paper and looking at it for a few minutes, no longer listening to him.
“How come you haven’t asked me about her since she came back?” I cut him off.
“What are you talking about? Who?” he asks, looking at me like I’m the annoying one.
