Page 61 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“Sam?” His voice was rough, like he had not used it in hours, which he probably had not.
I stepped into the room. Let the door close behind me.
The sound of it clicking shut was definite. It meant something neither of us could pretend it did not.
“I needed to see you,” I said.
His hands tightened on the towel. Not nervous. More like his body was processing information his brain had not approved.
“Sam…” he started, and I heard the beginning of a sentence that would have been reasonable and measured and absolutely wrong for this moment.
“No.” I stepped closer. “Let me talk.”
He closed his mouth.
Good.
I took another step.
We were close now. Close enough that the heat from his workout radiated toward me, close enough that the scent of clean sweat and soap registered in my lungs like a language I had been learning without knowing it.
“I’m donehesitating,” I said.
My voice was steady. My hands were not, so I kept them at my sides where they could tremble privately.
“I’m done waiting for the timing to be right, because the timing is never going to be right. There will always be a contract, a trade, a Silas Vane with a reasonable objection, or a David Walsh with a cleaner, colder version of the same one.”
He watched me with an expression I had never seen on him. Not calculated. Open. The look of a man whose walls were standing but whose door was wide.
“I want you,” I said. “And I’m tired of acting like I don’t.”
The sentence stayed between us, alive with the electricity of a thing that had been true for weeks and was only now being said out loud.
He stayed still.
Did not breathe.
His eyes were dark in the low light, and what I saw in them was not hesitation. It wasthe last second before a decision that had already been made.
I reached up and touched his jaw.
Lightly. Deliberately. My fingers against the line of bone I had been photographing for six weeks, the jaw I had watched clench and tighten through a thousand frames, and under my hand it was rough with the day’s stubble and entirely human.
His breath came out in a sound that was not quite a word. His hand lifted toward my waist, then stopped before it touched me.
That stopped me too.
“I want you,” he said.
His voice was low. Wrecked. Honest in a way that cost him something before the sentence was even finished.
“I want you so much I have not known what to do with myself since the first day you walked in with that damn camera and told me to look at you like I wasn’t scared.”
My fingers stayed against his jaw.
“Then stop hesitating,” I whispered.
He closedhis eyes once.
