Still no rosary. The iron clamp around my ribs loosens by degrees.
Shiloh’s voice drops to a near-whisper. “You, uh…finding what you need?”
I shouldlie.
Instead I say, “I didn’t find what I was afraid of.” My voice emerges husky, lower than usual.
His expression changes—not confusion exactly, but a sharpened awareness, like he heard the truth inside the part I didn’t say. He could push, but he doesn’t.
“Okay,” he says, and God, I don’t know what to do with a man who can leave it there.
My fingers keep moving, and I tell myself it’s because I’m confirming.
I know that’s a lie, though.
The pads of my fingers trace a line over his collarbone, drift down the center of his chest, map the edges of ink and heat and the rise-and-fall of his breathing. I should pull away once I know he doesn’t carry that mark.
I don’t.
His hand comes up and wraps around my wrist—not stopping me, just holding me there where my palm is spread over his chest.
“Reva.”
It’s my name and a warning and a question all at once. Rain hammers the windows. Thunder rolls close enough to shake the glass.
I look at him. Really look.
There’s no grin. No game. No charm sharpened into a blade. Just a man sitting in my bed in the middle of astorm with sleep in his eyes and concern on his face and my pulse under his thumb.
I kiss him first.
Not hard. Just my mouth brushing his, tentative enough to test if I still want this when it feels like this.
His inhale catches. Then he kisses me back, slow and careful in a way that nearly breaks me more than roughness ever could.
The first time with Shiloh was heat and adrenaline and need. A collision. Bodies and friction and the brief relief of not having to think.
This is something meaner.
Softer.
Complicated enough to be dangerous.
He cups my jaw and deepens the kiss by inches, giving me time to turn away at every stage. I don’t. I open for him with a sound I wish I could take back, and he makes one of his own low in his throat like he’s trying not to scare me with how much he wants this too.
Feeling is worse than lust. Lust is easy to weaponize. Feeling asks for things.
I shift in his lap, and the hard length of him presses hot against my thigh. His fingers flex at my waist.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs against my mouth, voice roughening. “I’ll stop.”
I should. I know I should.
The mission. Deacon. Noir. The fact that I still don’t know what game I’m standing in or who’s moving the pieces around me.
But the storm is loud and the room is dark and he put light beside my bed without making me explain why I needed it.
“Don’t stop,” I whisper.
