Page 107 of The Exit Strategy

He ghosts his lips over mine. Our eyes are wide open. This kiss is different.

Turns out, kissing Cole Whittaker when I’m not furious at him is a completely different experience.

Our first kiss was desperation and six years of quiet craving. This—this is a slow masterclass in seduction. This is a man who has decided to take his time and doesn’t care that I’m vibrating out of my own skin.

His hands move from my face to my hair to my waist. Each transition is deliberate, like he’s learning each piece of me before he moves onto the next, and I have the disorienting sense of being truly paid attention to.

I’ve been looked at. I’ve been wanted. I’ve never been studied. “Cole.”

“Hmm,” he says against the sensitive skin of my neck.

I moan and angle my head to the side to give him better access.

“If you stop this time, if you pull away and hide from me again, I will put Ex-Lax in every caffeinated beverage in this house for the remainder of my time here.”

He laughs against my throat—a full-bodied sound. The real one I’ve only heard a handful of times since he left Boston. It’s low and startled and genuine.

Then he lifts me onto the counter and steps between my knees. His laughter fades into something else entirely.

It’s there in his gaze.

The fire.

The chemistry.

The combustible lust.

“I’m not stopping this time, Junie.” He’s so confident, so…sure.

“G-good.” My words tremble past my lips as my hands find the back of his neck. “Just establishing terms.”

“Noted.” Then he kisses me like a man signing his life away, and I stop the war of words I use as protection because there’s no version of what’s currently happening to my nervous system that knows what to do with words.

He breathes heavily against my ear as his calloused hands slide under the hem of my shirt. Skin to skin. His wounds to mine.

“Stop thinking so hard.” He sucks the lobe of my ear into his mouth and bites down hard enough to evoke a full-body shudder.

“I’m always thinking.”

“Stop.”

My body immediately listens to his command, but my mouth is incapable of following directions.

“You stop.”

He leans back just far enough to look at me, and I immediately resent the distance. His hair is slightly wrecked—I did that. His eyes are dark and focused so intently on me that I don’t notice his hands sliding up my ribcage until his thumbs skim the underside of my breast.

“Hi,” he says with a crooked smile that settles the fears inside me.

It shouldn’t work. It’s one word. And yet, it dismantles the hesitations calculating in the back of my mind.

“Hi.” My version is shyer, quieter, needier.

I hold my breath as he leans in to kiss me again, and this time I stop trying to maintain the running monologue that usually keeps me a safe distance from my own feelings. Because distance is something Cole and Ihave had, and now, I fully understand why it will never work.

He pinches my nipples between his thumbs and forefingers, just hard enough to get a reaction out of me, and my body bends to his will when my hips shoot forward, my back arching into him.

The moan that escapes my throat has him groaning in response.