I look up at him. “Move.”
He doesn’t.
The air between us is charged in that awful, familiar way it always seems to be around him. Too much in too little space. Too much history for something that shouldn’t even count as history. One night on a plane. One kiss in the dark. One child he still doesn’t know is his.
My whole body is alive with nerves.
“You don’t get to do this,” I say. “You don’t get to walk around like everyone should just accept whatever you are and never ask questions.”
His gaze stays on mine. “You can ask me.”
“Can I?”
“Yes.”
“Will you answer?”
His face changes, just slightly. Not softer. More intent. “Some things.”
I laugh once, breathless and angry. “That’s what I thought.”
I try to step past him.
He catches my wrist. Not hard. Nothing like Ethan. But the contact jolts through me anyway.
“Don’t,” he says.
I yank once on instinct, more from anger than fear. “Let go.”
His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there for a moment too long. When he looks back up, his voice is lower. “You should stop looking at me like that.”
My pulse trips. “Like what?”
“Like you hate me and want me at the same time.”
Heat rushes into my face, and I hate that he can still do that to me in the middle of all this. “You are unbelievably arrogant.”
“Yes,” he says. “But not wrong.”
I should slap him.
I should tell him to get out.
Instead, I stand there with my wrist in his hand, breathing too fast, every nerve in my body already tuned to him. Because the truth is I did call Talia to ask who he was, but I already knew the answer that mattered. Dangerous. Powerful. The kind of man you do not survive cleanly.
And still, some ruined part of me aches for him in ways I don’t understand.
Not sensibly. Not well. Not for any reason I could defend. But there it is, raw and humiliating and impossible to deny, living beside fear and anger and desire like they were made to share a home.
“We should stay away from each other,” I whisper.
“Yes.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
His hand slides from my wrist to my jaw.
Of all the things he could say, all the smooth or brutal or clever answers I half expect from him, the truth in his face is what undoes me first.