Heat raced down her spine, splattering into a molten puddle at the bottom. His breath lashed fire across her skin.
“Someone should touch you,” she repeated, on a gasp. She murmured it over and over, chanted it to him, and the incantation drowned out everything else, even the pop of sap-soaked firewood and the whisper of sleet on glass.
Because honestly,someoneneeded to appreciate the long, smooth columns of muscle flanking his spine, the way the groove of his abs hugged a dragged finger. Someone should worship the solid expanse of his chest and the faint dusting of hair that charted a course down from his belly button.
Nick rasped a sound of pure hunger against her throat, then pressed his lips to the tender flesh there. She gave herself up to an endless shiver. She should stop this, but instinct thieved away rational thought. All she wanted to do was climb him, bite him, lick, suck, grab...
His mouth withdrew abruptly, leaving her gasping and empty. She glanced down to find her fingers snared in his waistband. She’d undone the button of his jeans and taken hold of his zipper.
He muttered a curse, then gripped her shoulders and lowered his forehead to hers. “Aubs, you can’t. If I stay here... If you... If we...”
A whimper slid from her lips. “What, you don’t want me?”
He made a broken sound. “Of course I do. Fuck, are you kidding? You’re what I want most. I’d ruin myself ten times over just to have you again. Even once. I’d break myself to pieces and thank you for it.”
Her voice nearly deserted her. “But?”
“You’re with someone,” he said, hollow. “And after what my dad did... I can’t. You know that. I can’t even be the other half of someone else’s equation.”
Each word chipped a jagged piece from her soul. She had no idea how they’d gotten like this, pressed up against a wall together. She only knew she wanted more.
Was that so wrong?
Maybe. She honestly didn’t know where the line was, with Gallant. A part of her had tied itself to his letters, but Nick’s nearness awakened something, a force as everlasting as the one that bound her to the earth.
She would never, she realized, not feel this way.
Yet opening this door again would mean closing another she’d only just discovered. One that might lead to her best shot at happiness, because she couldn’t stay in Henderson. She couldn’t give up her dream job, or walk away from her database project, not even for Nick. If she did, she would wither. Slowly but surely, the light that had burned so brightly in New York would fade to ashes.
“You’re right,” she whispered. She hated it, but he was right.
“I know.”
Still, he didn’t retreat. His hands found her hips again, pulling her flush against him. Want crackled under her skin like a living thing.
“I need you to do something for me,” he finally said.
His pleading tone nearly broke her heart. “Anything.”
“Tell me that guy’s name. In New York. The one who stole your job.”
She tried to reassemble her composure. How could he be thinking ofthatright now? “What? Why’re you asking?”
“You know why.”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. “It’s... David. David Ballard.”
Nick repeated the name. “Thank you,” he said, then released her and stepped back.
An abyss opened within her as she sagged against the wall. Only the unguarded longing in his eyes kept her legs beneath her.
She memorized the hawklike planes of his face, the way his brows tapered to points, as if they’d been shaped, only she knew they hadn’t, because they’d always looked that way. “Nick, I don’t—”
“I never fell out of love with you,” he said roughly. “I never will. But I can never leave Paige. And you can’t stay here. I wouldn’t ask that of you even if I deserved to. What’s more, you have someone else, now. And the last thing I want to do is screw that up.”
Just like that, he was gone, and the agony of his absence stole all the air from her lungs. The front door opened and closed. Outside, an engine roared and faded.
Only when the truck’s rumble melted into the susurrus of falling sleet did she let herself slide down the wall.
