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“This is a bad idea.”
“Yes.”
“You’re agreeing too easily.”
“I’m trying to hear you.”
The words hit harder than they had any right to.
I looked at her mouth and remembered every sound I’d ever pulled from it. Charm saw the second my control failed. Her fingers curled into my shirt, and she rose onto her toes as I slid one hand into her hair and kissed her.
Politeness never entered it.
Charm’s arms circled my neck as my other hand caught her waist and dragged her against me. She opened beneath my mouth with a sound I remembered too well, pressing into me while the kiss found the same consuming rhythm we’d never needed to learn twice.
She tasted like vodka, chocolate, and fifteen months of everything I’d been unable to forget.
I pressed her against the door, keeping one hand behind her head to protect her from the wood while my palm traveled down her side. Charm’s body met mine with curves that hadn’t been there before. Fifteen months ago, she’d been so thin my hands found the sharp lines of her hips beneath everything she wore. Softness covered those angles now. Her waist curved into fuller hips, and when I gripped her ass, my fingers sank into warm flesh that filled my palm and destroyed whatever restraint remained.
Charm moaned into my mouth and pulled me harder against her.
“Fuck.” I dragged my mouth along her jaw. “You feel so fucking good.”
Her nails scraped the back of my neck. “You said no.”
“I changed my mind.”
“You’re allowed to do that now.”
I caught her jaw and brought her eyes back to mine. “Don’t.”
The hope inside the words stripped some of the heat from her expression.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I kissed her again because I didn’t want apologies against my mouth. I wanted the woman beneath my hands without the past standing between us, even if I could only manage it for another minute.
The key card slipped from Charm’s fingers and struck the carpet.
The sound should’ve reached the final useful piece of my brain. Fifteen months ago, it would have. I would’ve torn my mouth from hers, forced distance between us, and explained every reason wanting each other couldn’t fix what stood between us.
I didn’t want to explain another goddamn thing.
I wanted the answer I came here to find.
Charm made a breathless sound when I pushed her harder against the door. My hand remained buried in her hair while the other tightened around the curve of her ass, pulling her against the erection she’d been creating since she walked onto the terrace in green satin and watched me discover every part of her body she no longer tried to hide.
Her nails scraped beneath my collar. “Ryan.”
Hearing my name against her mouth broke something open. I kissed her with every ugly, starving piece of the last fifteen months behind it. The loneliness waiting inside my Milwaukee apartment. The women whose names I deliberately forgot. Every morning I reached across an empty bed before remembering why she wasn’t there. Every night I convinced myself missing Charm was a pain I had learned to carry when all I had really done was build a life loud enough to keep from hearing it.
I wanted her, and I wanted my anger.
I wanted to take both into that room without pretending one canceled the other. I could touch the woman I had never stopped craving while remembering exactly why she no longer belonged to me. I could let her be mine for one night without handing her anything she could keep.
Her thigh slid between mine as she opened beneath my mouth. I caught the back of her neck and tilted her head, dragging my lips across her jaw before finding the sensitive place beneath her ear that had once made her collapse against me.
It still did.
