Page 53 of Duty Preserved

I flipped the phone facedown. Too late. I could feel heat on my cheeks.

The silence was total. My own heartbeat and the hum of the air conditioner and nothing else.

“Alyson is… She doesn’t… I’m not…”

The sentences died. Every one of them. Because what was there to say? The text was the text. He’d read it.

If Alyson were here, she’d be laughing. She’d make this easy.

He didn’t move.

“That’s just how she is,” I said. “She doesn’t mean anything by it. She just thinks everyone should be as comfortable with—” I gestured vaguely at the room, at him, at everything. “She doesn’t understand that some people can’t just do that.”

The words were coming faster, spilling out of a place I hadn’t opened on purpose.

“I don’t know how to be easy about things, Donovan. I never have.”

My voice was climbing.

“I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be in a room with someone like you and not feel like I’m the wrong person in it.”

My eyes burned.

“You should be here with someone who isn’t me. Someone who knows what she’s doing. Someone who doesn’t book two rooms and then fall apart when one of them disappears.”

I covered my face with both hands because I couldn’t look at him while the last of it came out. I was spiraling. I knew it. Donovan knew it.

“Instead, you’re stuck with me, and I can’t even tell you what I want because I have never once in my life been the woman who gets to have what she wants.”

There it was. My deepest hurt floating in the space between us.

I sucked in a breath and waited. I had no clue how to salvage this.

He crossed the room. Two steps. His hands closed around my wrists, and he drew them down from my face, gently, firmly, and before I could take another breath, his mouth was on mine. Every word I’d been saying collapsed into silence.

My back touched the door behind me. His hands were still around my wrists, holding them down between us, and the kiss was so steady and so sure that my spiral broke apart. He took his time.

He didn’t want easy. He didn’t want someone else.

He wanted me.

He let go of my wrists. His palm settled against my jaw, and he tilted my face up and kissed me again, slower. My fingers curled into the fabric at his sides and held.

I kissed him back, and the entire room disappeared around us.

For the first time since Gregory, I let myself feel desired.

Chapter 14

Donovan

She shifted her hands from my sides to the front of my shirt, gripped the material with both hands, and kissed me like I was the last solid thing in the room.

Her mouth was hot and open against mine, and every part of me wanted to stay right there and not stop.

But her hands were still shaking.

She’d been standing here telling me she’d never been the woman anyone wanted. Her voice had been climbing. Her eyes had been burning. I’d kissed her because it was the only idea I had to bring her back to the present moment.