He steps closer. Close enough that I can smell clean soap and dark cedar and the faint lingering trace of coffee beneath it. Close enough that if I shifted even slightly, the fabric of my dress would brush his coat.
“It softens you,” he says, voice quiet. “Makes you look like something I was never meant to touch.”
A shiver runs through me so sharp it almost hurts. I hate him for saying things like that and I hate myself more for loving it.
“It’s a dress,” I whisper.
His gaze drifts over me again, slower this time. Hungrier. “No.”
I clutch the cardigan tighter. “You need to leave.”
“And yet,” he says, his hand sliding from the strap to the curve of my upper arm, “you’re still standing here.”
I should move.
I don’t.
The silence thickens.
His thumb strokes once, lightly, along my bare skin. Nothing obscene. Nothing even close.
It feels devastating anyway.
“Tell me to go,” he says.
I look at his mouth.
That is my first mistake.
The second is answering honestly. “I want to.”
His eyes darken. “But?”
I hate that single word. Hate how easily it pulls the truth to the surface.
“But I know you won’t.”
Something almost like approval flickers across his face.
“Probably not.”
I should be furious.
Instead, I’m breathless.
He reaches up and catches a loose strand of my hair, tucking it behind my ear with a tenderness that feels indecent in a fitting room, in the middle of London, in the middle of everything that still lies shattered between us.
“You have no idea what you do to me in this color,” he says.
My laugh comes out unsteady. “That sounds like your problem.”
“It is.”
The answer is immediate and rougher than before.
I look up at him and wish I hadn’t, because there it is—that crack in his control, that dark, addictive hunger he tries so hard to bury beneath all that composure. It makes the room feel warmer. Closer. Like the air between us is slowly catching fire.
“Lorenzo—”
