“You’ve been looking for a fight since the airport,” he said.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
His gaze stayed fixed on mine. “It started after the phone call.”
There it was.
Too accurate. Too calm.
I gave a short laugh. “Congratulations. You solved the case.”
He came closer, not enough to crowd me, enough that my body tracked every inch. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“What you’re angry about.”
“You really want to do this in a hotel hallway?”
“No. But you’re about to make it everyone’s problem if we don’t.”
The truth punched out of me. “You sounded happy.”
He stopped.
I hated the silence. Filled it immediately.
“With her. On the phone. You sounded normal and warm and like you belong to someone else, which is funny, because you do. So maybe I’m the asshole for noticing.”
Declan’s face changed, not a crack this time. A hit.
“Jace.”
“No. You don’t get to say my name like that and make me reasonable.” My voice dropped, rough and fast. “You tell me not here, not now, not this. You fix my tie in a hallway, then walk back to your wife’s phone call and I walk back to my girlfriend’s table, and we’re supposed to what? Keep breathing through it? Keep finding corners where you can look at me like you’re one second from putting your hands on me and then decide we’re civilized?”
His eyes sharpened. “Lower your voice.”
“See, that right there. That’s the problem. I want to listen when you sound like that.”
Heat flashed across his face, gone almost instantly.
I stepped back because staying still felt impossible. “Then what exactly are we doing?”
He didn’t answer fast.
That hurt more than I expected.
“Right,” I said. “Great talk.”
I pushed the stairwell door open.
His hand closed around my wrist.
Not hard. Not punishment. Not even enough to stop me if I truly pulled away.
I stopped anyway.
The hallway went silent around the point where his fingers circled my pulse.
