Page 93 of What We Bury

I take another step closer.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t uncross his arms, doesn’t push off the wall, doesn’t close the last of the distance. He just watches me come, that mountain stillness wrapped around something I can feel humming underneath it, like standing too close to a struck bell.

I stop a foot away. Close enough to feel the heat coming off him. Close enough that he has to tip his chin down to keep my eyes.

“Do you want me?” I ask.

I expect a grunt. A deflection.That’s the job.

His eyes move over my face, slow, and when he answers it’s lower than I’ve ever heard him. “Yes.”

The word lands somewhere south of my navel and pulls tight.

“Then touch me.”

“No.”

My stomach drops—a clean, cold plunge—right up until he leans down, mouth at the shell of my ear, and thenoturns out to have a second half.

“You want my hands on you, you put them there.” He straightens just enough to hold my eyes again, and there’s nothing soft in his now. “I don’t take what isn’t handed to me. So you decide. You move. I’ll meet you the second you do.” A beat. “But you come to me. Every time.”

It should make me feel powerful. It does. It also makes me want to scream, because he’s just handed me the whole thing and dared me to want it out loud.

So I test him.

I reach up and curl my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull, trying to drag him down to me—and he doesn’t move. Doesn’t bend an inch. I might as well be tugging on the brick. He just lets me haul at him, one eyebrow rising, the corner of his mouth tilting, immovable as a dropped anchor.

But under my knuckles his heart is going like something trying to get out.

He wants this. He wants it bad enough that holding still is costing him—I can feel the effort of it, the leash pulled tight—and he’s holding still anyway. Because making me close the distanceis the entire point, and he will stand here all night sooner than rob me of it.

Fine.

If he wants me to take it, I’ll take it.

I let go of his shirt. Slide my hand up instead—over the wall of his chest, the corded muscle of his throat, the rough line of his jaw—until my palm is cupping the side of his face and his stubble bites into my skin. He lets me. Lets me tilt his head exactly where I want it. The most dangerous man I’ve ever stood next to, holding still under my hand like he’s been waiting his whole life to be moved by someone smaller than him.

“Knox,” I breathe.

“Yeah.”

“Kiss me.”

TWENTY-FIVE

SAGE

His hand cups the back of my skull and his mouth is on mine and the kiss is not gentle. It’s not rough either. It’s certain. His other hand finds my hip and he turns me, walks me back until my shoulder blades hit the brick, and then he kisses me deeper, his thumb pressing under my jaw to angle my mouth where he wants it. He tastes like coffee and cherry and sin.

I make a sound. He makes one back, low in his chest, and I feel it everywhere. I’m wet before he’s touched me anywhere that should make me wet. Just from his mouth and the weight of his body.

He pulls back half an inch. Eyes dark. Breathing wrecked.

“Tell me to stop.”

“No.”

“Sage . . .”