Instead, I stand very still while Ever comes behind me and Shiloh steps in close. It isn’t gentleness, exactly, but it isn’t force either. It’s something more dangerous than both. An expectation. A confidence that I’m going to let this happen because some part of me has already stepped into the current and decided not to fight the pull of the ocean dragging me under.
Ever’s hand settles at my waist. Shiloh lifts a finger under my chin, tipping my faceup.
“Tell me to stop,” he says quietly, and the words jolt through me more than if he’d touched me somewhere bare.
I look at him. At the dark humor gone serious in his eyes. At the awareness there. At the fact that he’s giving me an out when I least expected one.
The room seems to narrow to that single questioning order.
Would he stop? Would he step away? He was the first of them. The first to kiss me. The first to make me feel more. But now, in this moment, he’s finding a way to give me one last choice.
Do I want them to stop?
My pulse skids. I could say it. I could choose something different, something…less. Something in me knows that this is a moment of decision, a point of choice. I can walk away. Go back to Chicago.
Give up.
Givethemup.
Instead I hear my own voice, rougher than I mean it to be. “I’m not stopping you.”
A sound low in Ever’s chest. Approval maybe. Or restraint.
From the chair, Nash says, “Good.”
Shiloh kisses me. No teasing prelude. No testing brush of lips. Just a kiss that lands like a hand at the nape of my neck and pushes me into his obsession.
Ever’s grip tightens at my waist as my balance shifts back into him. Shiloh angles my head, deepening his assault at once, his mouth hot and demanding and wickedly skilled. He tastes like whiskey and sin and something sweet beneath it. The room drops away.
“We’re not letting you run from this,” Ever whispers against my ear. “From us.”
The words slide through me, replacing everything I believe to be truth with nothing more than this. Thanthem.
Shiloh deepens the kiss, and this isn’t a kiss at all really. Not the kind I understand from normal life, from ordinary men and ordinary mistakes I’ve made. This is a confrontation. A correction. A way to exert control and force me to feel things I’m not ready to feel.
And yet…breaking away is impossible. It’s not because they’re holding me. It’s because Ineedthis like I need my next breath. Because Icravewhat they do to me. Individually, and together like this.
I’m not the only one.
Shiloh kisses me with control that morphs into a leash biting into his skin, nearly lost, and Ever behind me feels wound so tight I can sense every held back inch of him.
My entire world is narrowing down to these men.
The gun in my purse. Deacon. My careful plans.
All of it blurs under the heat of mouths and hands and breath. Adrenaline breaks the dam. I lose myself in the way their bodies bracket mine—protection and prison all at once.
These are bad men. Good men don’t kiss the way they do. Don’t force their way into my life the way these three have.
Good men don’t take everything and give nothing in return.
Shiloh takes and gives in equal measure, and desire drives clean through the last of my reservations. Ever makes it impossible to reach for more until I wrench one arm free and hook it over his neck behind me, dragging him impossibly closer.
The sound he makes is almost a growl.
Shiloh comes up for air just long enough for me to turn my head to Ever. His lips snag mine.
Different. God, so different.
