RICH BOY BRIT (A Bad Boy Stepbrother Romance)(13)

I stopped with my hand on the wall next to the door. I half-turned, turned back, and then turned fully, facing her, almost challenging her. Or maybe I was just challenging the cowardly part of me that told me to go back upstairs and ignore my other urges.

“Jessica,” I said.

She looked up, but not fully. She never looked fully up. It was always just far enough so that she could see you, and no more. “Hmm?” she said, and I knew right then that that was the only sound she was able to make. She was inexplicably anxious right now. Her bare feet wiggled against the chair (trapped her knees, her folded legs). Her fingertips moved up and down the edge of the pages so quickly I thought she might get a paper cut. I almost felt cruel—almost. But not cruel enough to stop.

“Have you thought about it?” I said, and was surprised to find I sounded nervous, too. I rubbed at the dagger tattoo with my other hand as I spoke, and felt for all the world like a twelve-year-old asking a girl to the movies. “That night, I mean?”

“I know what you mean,” she said quietly. She closed her eyes for a moment, took a quick breath—steeling herself, I sensed—and then all her fidgeting stopped, all at once. It was like she was an electrical device and somebody had switched the switch. That, and the look of determination on her face, told me that what she was about to say meant a lot to her. I didn’t know her, not really, but I was sure of this. She spoke the words slowly, forcefully.

“I have thought about it every second since it happened. I can’t stop thinking about it. Trust me, I’ve tried.” She still didn’t look straight at me, and her body was completely still. If it were not for her moving lips, she could have been a statue. “I’ve thought about it every single moment. It’s been in the back of my mind for—forever, it feels like, even though it’s only been two days.”

Listening to this was uncanny. It was like she was explaining exactly how I felt. I took a step forward, hardly feeling like I was doing anything at all, but like there was a connection between us compelling me to act. I took another step, and another, and then laid the glass on the side. I was standing over her in a moment, without any concrete idea of how I’d gotten there. I looked down at her. Slowly, she looked (almost) up at me, her hair covering her eyes, her makeup faded and blue-black. “We can’t do anything,” she whispered. “Not—not now.”

I reached down, ignoring her words. I couldn’t fight how I felt, even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, not particularly. My hand seemed to move slowly, impossibly slowly, but eventually it was near her face. Her sigh brushed the back of my hand, caressed the dagger tattoo, sending warmth up my arm and to my chest. My fingertips reached outward and made contact with her skin: warm, soft, smooth. I moved my hand to her mouth, brushed my thumb along her lower lip. “We didn’t get a chance to kiss,” I said. “Shouldn’t we correct that?”

She sighed with tones of defeat, like somebody after a long argument, and then untucked her feet and stood up. She came to just below my shoulders. I’d taken my hand from her face. I reached around to her back and pulled her close to me, pressed our bodies close, the scent of her perfume and her hair thick and welcome and near-perfect.

“We could,” she whispered, still outwardly calm apart from a faint trembling of her arms. “Just once, though.”

“Just once,” I agreed.





Jessica

The heat of his body was powerful. I felt close to him, closer than I had ever felt to anybody. It was madness, I knew, because I didn’t know this man at all. I had read—oh, had I read!—about women who felt this way about men this soon before, but I had never truly thought it happened. A literary device, I’d assumed. It was a literary device like pathetic fallacy or foreshadowing and it had no bearing on my life. But then, how did I account for this feeling? It wasn’t only the sex; it couldn’t only be the sex.

A strange calm had descended over me when he asked me the direct question. For a blissful moment I had felt clear, directed. I had known what to say. The remnants of that calm were still with me—it was something in his presence—but my anxiety was returning. And something else—excitement. It was a piqued, sexual excitement like the night of the wolf and the lion. My body remembered his well. My nipples became hard and my chest rose and fell to the sound of a leaping heartbeat.

He had taken his hand from my face. Now, he reached down and wrapped it around my waist. He pulled us together, so that our bodies were pressed together. His hand was powerful, immovable. I felt powerless, and not in a bad way. All the anxiety, the worry, the stress . . . it didn’t fall away. Life is not that easy. But I sensed that with this man I could build the kind of partnership where it could fall away. If I did not feel certain, I felt close.

“We could,” I said, my voice a faint whisper. “Just once, though.” Did I know it was a lie? I’m not sure.

“Just once,” he confirmed.

He bent down and I turned my face up to him. There was heat all around us, from the warm summer night and the warm tingles running over my body and mostly from his body. When I turned my face up to him, it felt like on a sunny day when you turn it up to the sun. This is going to be my stepbrother, I thought. But right then, the thought seemed unimportant.

His lips touched mine. They seemed molded to them, like they had been shaped exactly for this purpose. I reached my hands up without thinking—as though I had kissed this man many times before—and placed them on his shoulders. He pressed his lips into mine so hard that I felt our teeth press together through the kiss. He moaned, and instantly I remembered the moans of the lion, of the way the lion had moaned for me, with me, when we had made love. And that was how I thought of it now, I realized—making love.