It’s not a yes.
“You take all the time you need.”
He twisted around and faced me. “You’ll wait?”
Forever if I had to. “Yes.”
He changed positions and hugged his knees. We sat in silence, and I studied his cousin’s photos.
“Here’s the thing.”
It wasn’t a question, there was no appropriate response because I hadn’t a clue what he was about to say.
“What if I don’t want to say goodbye?”
My heart did some weird shit, and I tugged at my sweater. It sounded as though he was… Nope, I didn’t want to make assumptions. He might be about to suggest we become fuck buddies.
“You have free will, Bronson.”
“But I need to know this is me making the decision and there’s no invisible hand manipulating me like a marionette.”
He put his feet on the floor and shuffled across the couch cushions so we were touching just barely. It was a whisper of a touch, though my beast insisted that wasn’t a real thing.
“It’s all you.” My love and one and only.
He leaned toward me and his lips slammed onto mine. His mouth demanded I respond, while he ran his hands through my hair. I had to remind myself how to breathe because my brain was in shock. In and out. In and out.
My brain finally caught up, and I kissed him back, but we weren’t close enough, and I dragged him onto my lap while I tangled my fingers in his hair. He straddled me as my tongue probed his lips and demanded entry, and he let me.
“I changed my mind,” he mumbled into my mouth. “I choose us.”
10
BRONSON
“I choose us.”
I let all caution go to the wind, giving in to the sensation of his lips against mine and allowing the comforting feeling I felt around him to envelop me. I was no longer pushing it away, looking for facts or reasons why everything was happening. None of that mattered. The only thing that did was him and me and this connection we had.
Our kiss deepened, and I got lost in it. Nothing mattered except the two of us. I reached for the hem of his shirt, needing more, when the smoke alarm went off.
I jumped back and ran into the kitchen, turning off the pot of what had once been our dinner and was now a black mess.
Lincoln was right behind me, asking, “What can I do?”
“Try to get the smoke away from the alarm while I take care of this,” I said, handing him a towel.
He immediately went into action as I attempted to salvage any part of our dinner and failed miserably. I eventually gave upand put the lid back on. The alarm finally stopped going off, which was good, because in this building, if it kept going, the entire building would be evacuated, and then all of the neighbors would be pissed. I knew this because, more than once, I had been that pissed neighbor.
“So, good news and bad news, Lincoln,” I said. “The good news is we don’t need to worry about the building-wide alarms going off. The bad news? Dinner’s done for. That delightful pasta dish you were smelling? Yeah, not so delightful.” The poor shrimp looked like bricks of charcoal.
“That’s okay.” He took two steps closer to me. “I was kind of hungry for something else.”
“I was too.” I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him down for a kiss, breaking only when the alarm decided to beep again.
“I got the towel,” he said, and he went back to fanning it as I opened the windows and turned the exhaust fan on higher.
I’d been so deep into the kiss before that I hadn’t realized how bad the smoke had been. But now that we were actively working to clear the air, it was bad. Really, really bad.
