Page 137 of Resist

“Good. It serves them right.” The women will know she’s right, and the men will know she’s mine. I slip out of her. “Stay there.” I walk to the en suite bathroom and grab a towel and clean myself off. Then I grab one and walk over to where she’s perched on the dresser, legs spread, and clean her up. “There you go.” But when I glance up, she has that look in her eyes—the one that makes me want to taste those lips again.

“You better get back,” she says, the same emotion I feel clogging in her throat.

I take a step toward the door and turn to look at her one last time before unlocking it.

“Vaughn?” Her eyes flash up to me, but the rest of what I was going to say doesn’t come.

I love you.

I smile instead and hope she knows.

Because I do.

Fucking Christ, I am in love her.

“Yes?” Lids heavy with desire and satisfaction flutter open.

“I—you—fuck.” I scrub a hand through my hair as I struggle to tell her what it means for her to be here. For her to take hold of my goddamn heart when it’s never even been on the damn market. To look at her and see things I never expected to see before.

“I know,” she murmurs, smile soft and eyes reflecting the same way I feel back at me. “No defining, though.”

I chuckle. It’s easier than acknowledging how my chest constricts at those two simple words. “Woman, you’re beginning to make me want to define things I never imagined before.”

“Is that so?” Her question is playful, but the goddamn hope in her eyes makes it hard to swallow.

“It is.”

And when we’re done, when I open that door and shut it behind me, I’m sober.

Goddamn, Vaughn makes me sober . . . and thank fuck for that, or else I’d miss the high that being with her gives me.

Because I’d take that high any damn day of the week.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Vaughn

I can’t help the smile on my face.

Whatever just happened between Ryker and me—not the sex part, because I’d have to be comatose to not feel what he just did to me, but the unspoken part in the look he gave me—expressed all I needed to know about how he feels about me.

I recognize it, because I feel it too.

Screw their definitions.

We have our own.

Hoping to rejoin the party without my absence being scrutinized—well, then again, I am the one who told the ladies I had an alarm set—I open the door.

And startle at the figure standing in the hallway.

“Look at you.”

His voice. That voice.

“Excuse me—do I know you?” I ask, feigning nonchalance as I try to step around him and out of the corner I’m backed into.

He blocks my exit.