Cuff Me(33)

“Do you think I’m making a mistake?”

His chest clenched. Don’t ask me that.

But her gaze was level, her voice steady. She really wanted to know. Wanted his opinion.

He fished an M&M out of the bag—a brown one—to stall. “I assume that we’re talking about your shotgun wedding?”

She nodded.

“What’s going on? Trouble in paradise?”

“Not really,” she said, glancing down at the bed. “We’re not fighting. It’s just… we never see each other.”

“Which sucks,” he said slowly. “But plenty of couples make long-distance work, at least in the short term.”

“Yeah, because you know so much about couples,” she said crankily.

“It’ll get better,” he forced himself to say. “Just throw yourself into the wedding planning. Remind yourself all the reasons that these tough months are worth it.”

Jill smiled. “I think you might be the first guy in history to tell a woman to throw herself into wedding planning.”

“Yeah well… I’m not the one you’re marrying, now am I? I won’t have to deal with the worst of it.”

He intentionally kept his voice light, but her smile dimmed, just a little, before she seemed to force herself to recover. “Very true. And yet you will have to see me every day, so you just remember this little chat while I’m talking to you about chair covers and canapés and white lingerie.”

“That last one, I’m down with,” he said.

She smiled, and he smiled back. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked.

“Sure. Just been getting a lot of the jitters lately,” she said, rolling herself into a seated position and crossing her legs on the bed.

“Movie’s back,” she said, reaching for the remote and turning it up.

Okay then.

The conversation was apparently over. Usually it was him finding ways to stop talking, but tonight, he wanted to keep the conversation going. He wanted to know more about what was going on with her and Tom.

Wanted to hear more about these second thoughts she was having.

Instead, he reached for a candy bar and tore it open with his teeth as he turned his attention toward the noisy, brainless, yet fully entertaining movie.

Forty minutes later the credits started rolling and Vin waited for Jill to turn the channel.

And waited… and waited…

“Yo, Henley—”

He broke off when he glanced over and saw her. She was sound asleep.

Vincent gently pulled the remote out from under her hand and turned down the volume, thoroughly amused when he heard gentle snores coming out of his partner.

Jill Henley snored. How…

Cute.

It was cute.

He grinned to himself, reaching for his phone so he could capture it on video and use it for some good-natured blackmail in the future, only to find that his thumb didn’t hit Record like he meant it to.

Instead he found himself putting the phone away.

And then he looked at her. It was probably creepy, a man staring at a sleeping woman who was not his wife or girlfriend, but he couldn’t look away.

Jill looked younger than her age, even when awake. She had a girlish face and figure that gave her a perpetual twenty-three look, something he knew she loathed and loved in waves.

But sleeping, she looked… womanly.

Not old, not haggard, but as though she held all of the secrets of the world in her dreams; secrets only she knew.

Secrets that he wanted to beg her to share.

She made a smacking sound with her mouth and then rolled onto her side, one hand sliding up under her cheek, the other…

The other reached out toward him.

He froze, staring down at her small hand where it lay between them on the bed.

She hadn’t been reaching for him, obviously. She was asleep. Didn’t know that he was there.

And yet, he suddenly found it hard to swallow. Found it hard to look away from her pointy little nose, and the way a few strands of straight blond hair escaped her ponytail to lay against her cheek.

Before he realized what he was doing, he slid his hand along the bed until his fingertips were millimeters from hers.

And then he touched her hand. Just softly. His fingertip against her knuckle, the rough pad of his finger against her smooth skin.

He allowed himself to linger, just for a moment, his finger tracing each of hers. Drawing circles on the back of her hand.

Vincent wanted to flip her hand over. Wanted to touch his fingers to the nerve endings of her palm. Wanted to press his lips there. Wanted to lever himself over her, and— Vincent pulled his hand back. Slowly.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

The touch had been almost nothing—it was less than chaste.

And yet he thought of it, long, long into the night.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Hey, babe.”

“What’s up?” Jill asked, not looking up from where she was carefully chopping an onion. Maria Moretti had always made this look easy, but Jill had nearly taken off the tip of her middle finger.

“Are you aware that you have eight different types of pasta in here?”

“Um, you try being practically adopted by the Morettis and not come to think of it as a food group.”