The realization hits me like another fucking bullet. Because I don’t want to. Not even close.
I look over at her, the sunlight spilling over her skin, catching in the loose waves of her strawberry-blonde hair, and a dark selfishness unfurls inside my ribcage.
One month.
That’s all I was supposed to want.
One month to make her suffer. One month to settle the score that’s haunted me since childhood. One month to watch her crawl beneath the weight of what she did to me.
Instead I’m sitting here trying to figure out how the fuck I’m supposed to say goodbye now that I’ve had her in my bed. Now that I know how she sleeps, how I calm her, how I turn her on and the sounds she murmurs against my lips when she comes.
Christ.
I haven’t even touched her properly yet.
The thought arrives out of nowhere and nearly drives me insane.
I haven’t spread her open beneath my hands and learned every inch of her body. I haven’t heard the sounds she’d make if I used my fingers on her as well as my mouth. I haven’t held her face between my palms as she comes apart. I know she would let me, if only I had more time.
This business between us is so unfinished it’s barely started.
But it’s worse than that.
Somewhere between revenge and obsession, I made the gravest mistake a man like me can make. I started wanting things from her that have nothing to do with sex.
I want to feel her hand in mine as we show our faces in public. I want her in my apartment in the mornings with thatsleepy expression on her face. I want to hear her footsteps in my rooms.
I want to crush the black feather I locked in my desk drawer days ago.
But my brothers?—
A muscle jumps hard in my jaw.
They would never accept this—not after what happened. They still hate her the way Ishould.
But when I look at her now, I don’t see the awful things she said and did, that led to a chain of events that changed me inside and out. I see a frightened young woman who’s had to survive things that would’ve shattered many others.
If my brothers discover what’s happening between us—what I’m feeling—they’ll see it as weakness. Betrayal, even. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.
Pfeiffer lifts her gaze, uncertainty swimming in her bright blue eyes as she waits for my answer.
I can’t keep her openly. Not until I understand what the hell this thing between us is becoming—and whether I’m prepared to burn my entire life down for it. Which, disturbingly, no longer feels impossible.
I rub a thumb over my bottom lip and her cheeks flush sending an explosion of heat through my abdomen.
“What doyouwant, Pfeiffer?” I rasp. “Do you want to understand what this is between us? Or do you want to leave?”
Her lips part, the rise and fall of her chest pronounced beneath my shirt.
She breathes in deep. “I want to be around for my dad,” she says on a heavy exhalation. “I want to work as a nurse again. I want to feel settled.”
My heart thuds low and deep, on the edge of fracturing.
“But no. I don’t want to leave you.”
Turning her fiercely, I catch her lips in a desperate kiss, pushing her back against the bed. I sweep my tongue into hermouth and she reciprocates, both of us taking as much of each other as we can.
A moan passes from her throat to mine sending me dizzy. I pull apart for just a second.