Back In The Bedroom (The Wrong Bed #29)(29)

“Don’t.” God. He couldn’t take that. Without even knowing why, he reached for her hand. “And don’t make me out to be someone I’m not.”

“I just want to know more about you.” She lifted her face. “Cheri told me something bad happened to you on your last job. That you’ve been messed up because of it.”

“Cheri talks too much.”

Her other hand came up and sandwiched his, then she brought it up between her breasts, against her heart, which he could feel beating strong and steadily.

“I promised myself I wasn’t going to touch you,” she said. “But then you touched my hand and…” She smiled a little. “And I can’t seem to resist.”

“I shouldn’t have touched you at all. Ever.”

“It’s too late. Did you know…?”

“What?”

“That I’ve been the one to kiss you, every time?”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her mouth. “Have you?”

“Yes. And next time…if there is a next time, you’ll have to kiss me.”

He absolutely was not going to do that. Her lips were naked and parted, and now he had to close his eyes. Probably. He probably wasn’t going to kiss her.

“Tell me what makes you so…stoic,” she said softly.

“Just because I don’t talk every moment of the day doesn’t mean I’m stoic.”

She let out a little laugh and said, “Okay, maybe stoic isn’t the right word. But distant isn’t either, or cold.” She tilted her head and dropped her gaze to his lips, which reminded him of how they felt on hers.

“Definitely not distant,” she whispered. “Or cold.”

He groaned; he couldn’t help it. His hands dropped down to her hips and dragged her closer. “You drive me crazy.”

“Why?”

“You make me want.” He dropped his forehead to hers. “I don’t want to want, damn it.”

“Because of what happened to you?” She cupped his face. “Oh, Reilly. Did you get your heart broken?”

Broken, tromped on and destroyed, but that was another story. “She shouldn’t have told you I was in the CIA. She shouldn’t have told you that my last job went bad, that I was betrayed by a double agent who just happened to be sleeping with me at the time.”

Her eyes softened even more and she slid her arms around his neck. “She didn’t tell me that part, she never said… How badly were you hurt?”

“I don’t want—”

“Please, Reilly. Please tell me.”

It was the last thing he wanted to do, but he had to tell her something so it might as well be the truth. “Look, I was stuffed in a trunk for a few days and left to die,” he said, shrugging. “I’m over it.”

Now those eyes went suspiciously bright. Wet, shiny moss. “My God,” she whispered on a wavering breath as she hugged him so tightly he could barely breathe. “No wonder.”

“No wonder what?”

“No wonder you don’t like people close. You were hurt by someone you let in.”

“Not that hurt.”

“And no wonder you’re an accountant. You get to work alone. With numbers instead of people, for the most part.”

He didn’t know what to do with the fact she saw him so clearly. “I was an accountant for the CIA, too, before the field stuff. I was an analyst.”

“Everything makes so much sense now. Like why you’re afraid of the dark.”

He wasn’t afraid of the dark.

He wasn’t afraid of anything.

She skimmed her mouth over his jaw, leaving soft, short sweet little kisses as she worked her way over his flesh.

In reaction, his stomach tightened. Other parts did, too.

And as it turned out, he was afraid of something.

He was afraid of her. “Tess, I thought you weren’t going to kiss me—”

“I haven’t, not really. It doesn’t count unless I touch your lips with mine, which if you’ll notice, I didn’t do.”

He’d noticed. It was just that his body didn’t seem to be able to comprehend the difference, not one little bit. “Tess—”

“I like the way you shorten my name,” she whispered, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “I like that a lot. Reilly—”

Whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear it right now. He was a fraction of an inch from caving in, from giving in to her warm, giving body. He was so close to kissing her, all because she had eyes that sucked him in and a voice that he’d follow anywhere.

Because he had to, he set her away from him, this woman who seemed to personify temptation. “We have work,” he said. “Lots and lots of work.”

“Right.”

Her eyes told him that he could put this off for however long he wanted, but it wasn’t over.

And he found he was afraid of one more thing.

He was afraid she was right.





11




TESSA WORKED HARD for the rest of the day. She had no problems without Cheri, just double the work. That was okay with her, she loved being busy, loved being needed.

In her life there weren’t a lot of people who depended on her or needed her for anything. She and her friends were more casual than close. Then there were her siblings, who’d always taken on the authority role, or at least they thought they had. They’d laugh if Tessa tried to get them to need her in any way. As frustrating as it sometimes was, she felt quite certain they still thought of her as a little, snotty-nosed kid.