“Did you?”
“Yes.”
The certainty in her voice sounded rehearsed. I leaned slightly closer, lowering my voice.
“Then why the fuck are you still reacting to me like this?”
She drew in a shaky breath.
“Hayden,” she said, my name coming out strained this time.
And fuck, hearing Edwina say it that way did something to my chest I wasn’t prepared for. I leaned closer before I could think better of it, and the movement caught her off guard. A breath hitched in her throat, her jaw tightened, and still, her body betrayed her anyway.
Five years had changed the woman standing in front of me. She carried herself with sharper confidence now, choosing every word with care and keeping distance between us as though it could protect her from what still lived beneath the surface.
Then that familiar scent reached me.
Clean shampoo, something soft beneath it, something warm and unmistakably Edwina. It slipped under my skin before I could stop it, dragging me back to late nights, closed doors, brown hair against my mouth, a body near mine, ruining every sensible thought I had ever possessed.
Some reactions were written too deeply to erase.
I lowered my voice, letting the words settle between us.
“You can pretend you hate me all you want,” I murmured. “But your body remembers exactly who I am.”
Her eyes widened, and for a second, she looked ready to slap me. Instead, she pulled in a breath and forced herself still.
“You’re fucking crazy,” she said. “Let me out.”
“Yes,” I said, my gaze dropping to her mouth before returning to her eyes. “I am. About you.”
My gaze dropped to her mouth before I could stop it. God, she was tempting. For one reckless second, all I wanted was to grab her, pull her against me, and kiss the hell out of her until that anger broke into something neither of us could deny.
Her breathing had changed, no matter how hard she tried to hide it. The fury in her eyes faltered, and the wall she had held between us since the moment she entered my office began to crack in a way I recognized because I had seen it before, years ago, when she used to look at me and forget how much she wanted to resist.
Her gaze lifted to mine and stayed there too long. A pause stretched between us, and we both knew the tension had stopped pretending to be anything else. My eyes moved before I could stop them. From her eyes. To her lips. Then back again. The movement was subtle, but she noticed it instantly. Her breath caught. For a moment, she remained motionless, neither retreating nor averting her gaze. This brief hesitation shattered the final remnants of my restraint. Five years of separation, resentment, emotions left unsaid – all culminated in this instant, standing within a hairsbreadth of her.
Unable to restrain myself any longer, I reached out, my hand gripping her waist firmly as I bridged the gap between us. As our bodies collided, a flood of memories I had desperately tried to suppress surged through me.
“Hayden—”
Before she could finish uttering my name, our lips collided in a fierce, intense kiss. The heat between us escalated rapidly as our tongues intertwined, each of us desperate for more. The moment my mouth met hers it felt like something inside my chest snapped into place with a force that nearly knocked the breath out of me.
Her hands pressed against my chest as if she meant to push me away.
But she didn’t.
The hesitation lasted only a second, and that second made my grip tighten instinctively, as if some part of me believed she might disappear again if I didn’t hold on. Because the truth hit me with brutal clarity the moment our lips met.
Five years hadn’t erased her.
She remained in my head, in my body, in the part of me that had spent every one of those years knowing my life was missing her.
And kissing her again proved something even worse. The kiss carried everything we had never finished saying. The anger, the betrayal, the stupid, reckless relief of finally being within reach of feeling her again after years of imagining it.
She still felt familiar as home.
Edwina
