His gaze sharpened, and I snapped my eyes back up.
He smiled slowly. “Pip.”
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You want to. I see it.”
His laugh came low and rough, still threaded with the tension neither of us knew where to put.
I turned toward the treadmill like it might save me from myself, but my legs still felt unreliable and my pulse still lived somewhere near my throat, and I knew I had to leave before I did something catastrophically stupid.
Behind me, Cade’s voice dropped one last time, soft enough that only I could hear it beneath the music.
“For the record, Pip?”
I looked back despite every survival instinct I possessed.
His eyes held mine, dark and serious and still hungry. “That was me holding back.”
My entire body went hot.
I walked toward the gym door with shaking hands and a heart trying to claw its way out of my chest, and I knew with absolute certainty that whatever line Cade Mercer and I had been pretending existed between project and desire had not disappeared.
It had moved.
And neither of us knew how to move it back.
10
Bliss
By the time I made it to my Jeep, I felt like I had escaped with my dignity by the skin of my teeth. Barely.
My legs still didn’t feel completely reliable after whatever the hell had just happened in that gym. I had almost begged Cade Mercer to kiss me. Not thought about it. Not wondered what it would feel like in some soft, abstract, deeply delusional way. I had stood there in front of him with my pulse beating between my ribs like a trapped bird and wanted to say the words out loud.
Kiss me. Please, just once.
Which was obviously insane because I had rules. Entire lists of rules. Some written in logic, some written in scars, some carved so deeply into my nervous system that I barely remembered who I had been before needing them. And yet Cade kept walking right up to those rules with his steady eyes and careful hands and devastating restraint, making every single one of them feel less like protection and more like a locked door I suddenly wanted to open.
I climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door hard enough to make the whole Jeep rock. “Get it together,” I whispered.
The interior smelled like old coffee, vanilla body spray, and the faint plasticky heat that always clung to cars after warm afternoons. I tossed my gym bag onto the passenger seat, reached for my water bottle, and froze.
I stared at it for a full three seconds like it had personally betrayed me.
“No,” I said quietly. “Absolutely not.”
But there it was, sitting in my cup holder with his stupid initials marked in white near the lid. C.M. Of course, because apparently the universe had decided I needed one more chance to make a bad decision before dinner.
I glanced toward Hockey House.
The windows glowed warm against the early-evening dark, music vibrating low somewhere inside. Most of the guys were still downstairs or out back from the sound of it, laughter carrying through the open side windows and spilling across the driveway in messy bursts. I could leave the bottle on the porch. Text him. Pretend I didn’t know it was his. Pretend I hadn’t noticed that I’d grabbed it because my brain had been too busy replaying the feeling of him pressed behind me, his hands on my hips, his breath against my neck.
Instead, I got back out.
Because apparently I hated peace.
