He hadn’t really rehearsed a speech, his thoughts had been spinning the whole trip over here. So, he figured it was best if he didn’t talk at all. Instead, he wrapped his arm around her waist, pulled her against his body, and kissed her.
She kissed him back, hand pressed against his face as he lifted her up and walked her a few paces into the hotel lobby so that the door would close behind them.
Then he set her down, her high heels clicking on the floor. “Sorry,” he said. “For being so bad at this.”
She let out a fluttering breath and pressed her fingers to her lips. Then she looked away from him. “What are you doing here?”
“I didn’t want to leave it three weeks this time.”
“Before you kissed me and said something stupid?”
“To tell you that I want you,” he said heavily. “I want you, Marlowe. For as long as I can have you.”
Chapter Fourteen
This was just really stupid. She knew that. It had been stupid to kiss him back at the party. It was stupid to be up in the hotel, wandering around the lobby at midnight because she couldn’t make herself go to bed, because she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Because she had been doing her level best to stop herself from getting in her car and driving over to his house.
There was a whole genre of country music that she was a pretty big fan of, all about how a person shouldn’t drive over to their ex’s house and hook up with them, and she had never really understood it, because she hadn’t had an ex before. Now she did, Aiden, but it wasn’t him she was resisting going back to.
It was Cody.
Who had touched her body and set her on fire and made her feel things that she never had before.
It was Cody who had upended all her rational thought.
Cody, who was here now, making her heartbeat too fast, making her want to sweep everything off the registration desk and let him takeher there.
Didn’t she have any self-preservation?
Hadn’t she been through enough?
The question was valid, and yet, she didn’t want to give it attention.
She wanted to push aside rational thought, all her fears, all her worries, and make a very foolish decision.
“Okay. You have…” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Five sentences to try and explain why you were such a dumb ass earlier.”
“It was about me, really. It felt too big for me to handle, along with the opening of the hotel. I am very wound up about all of it because it connects to me wanting to get revenge on my dad. By living well and not self-destructing. It’s making me do things that are very stupid. I think that was five sentences.”
“That’s almost good enough,” she said.
It sounded like his dad had been terrible. Like his dad had had nothing to do with the raising of his siblings, and she could understand why this was a big deal to him.
What if she found out she had a big inheritance from her mom? How would she feel? Would it make her… erratic?
Maybe not. But there was something about Cody, something feral.
She’d worked to lose that wildness in herself. She’d tried to become something civilized, the kind of civilized that people recognized. The kind that blended in.
Cody was like the kind of wild horse she’d seen in movies. Powerful, untamable. If you ever wanted to get close, you had to go slow. Put your hand out, let him get your scent.
He would probably hate that evaluation of him, but oh well.
“What else can I do?”
“I’m not going to make you work that hard,” she said, “because I want you.”
She might as well be honest about it.
