Page 102 of Reckless
“That seems like your problem.”
“It’s literally on your face.”
“Because you put it there.”
“You kissed me back.”
“Enthusiastically.That doesn’t change the location of the evidence.”
I laughed.
Laughed.
The sound escaped me before I could stop it, bright in the night and entirely too intimate.
He smiled then.
A sharp, impossible little flash of joy between us.
God.
I reached up before I could think too hard about it and wiped my thumb lightly over his lower lip.
The contact was tiny, brief, but it sent a fresh wave of heat through both of us anyway.
He stopped.I stepped back.
“There,” I said.
“Tonight,” I reminded him.
The look he gave me should have been illegal in at least three states.
“Not tonight,” he agreed.“I want to see what happens sober.”
I wasn’t drunk.
He opened the terrace door for me like we had not just altered the shape of the entire weekend in a moonlit cove below his parents’ house.
I stepped inside.
Warmth breathed me whole.Light and voices.A family still awake and moving and utterly unaware that somewhere below them, their son and the last single woman in the friend group had just kissed like a promise and a problem at the same time.
I should have gone straight upstairs.
Instead I made it to the foot of the staircase before my body finally let the delayed reaction have me.
My hand tightened on the banister.
My whole body felt kissed.
And behind me, just barely, I heard the terrace door close and knew without turning that Xerses was still there, still in the room, still carrying the same impossible knowledge I was.
Tonight we had changed, completely.
And no amount of pretending otherwise was going to put it back as we were.
Twelve
