Page 24 of The Off Limits Captain
“Field observation.”
I move closer because she has not told me to stop. She tips her face up because she is brave or reckless or both.
“If this happens,” she says, “it cannot be because you are angry after a game.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You always look angry.”
“Not right now.”
Her gaze drops to my mouth. “No. Not right now.”
I touch her wrist first. Two fingers, light enough to be refused. Her pulse jumps under my hand.
“Peyton.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“No,” she says, and the honesty nearly ruins me. “But I want to.”
That is enough.
The first kiss happens with the door closed and the room still pretending to be ordinary. My mouth finds hers lightly, once, like a question neither of us can ask in daylight. Peyton answers by fisting one hand in my shirt and pulling me closer. I give her the second kiss slower because the first told me too much. Her mouth is warm and clever under mine, opening on a breath that sounds almost angry. Peyton makes a small noise against me, half protest, half permission, and I feel it travel straight through the discipline I have spent years pretending was bone-deep. I keep my hand at her waist, thumb still, fingers spread over the thin cotton of her shirt. Not lower. Not higher. The restraint feels obscene because it is deliberate, because every place I do not touch her becomes something we both know I have thought about.
Peyton releases the kiss just enough to breathe. “Are you always this controlled?”
“No.”
The answer comes out too rough.
Her eyes darken. “Good.”
I should step back now. I should let that be the edge of the mistake.
Instead I dip my head and put my mouth to the hinge of her jaw, open and slow, and feel her fingers tighten in my hair hard enough to sting.
“Ryan.”
My name does not sound like a warning in her mouth.
Neither of us has moved.
After that, restraint becomes difficult.
I press her against the wall beside the door, one hand resting on her shoulder and the other at her waist, giving me a place to hold all my desire without losing control.
Her kisses match her arguments.
She comes straight at me and dares me to answer.
“Still trouble?” I ask against her mouth.
“Worse.”
“Tell me to go.”
