Her amused huff flared her nostrils, and her shoulders dropped a fraction. “Can’t disagree with you there.”
“And you’re not creepy.” His tone dared her to argue. “You’re curious.”
“About murder. Which isn’t at all creepy,” she said dryly. “But enough about me. Why aren’tyouin a long-term relationship, Simon?”
Another question no one had asked him before now.
His instinctive response, true but incomplete:I’ve never been interested in one.
But unlike last time, he wasn’t going to make her work for the full, honest answer. Not after she’d bared at least a corner of her scarred heart to him, despite her obvious wariness.
“If I were going to invite that kind of upheaval into my life…” The words were slippery, but he was trying to grasp them, trying to explain himself in a way he’d never attempted before. “Sometimes, two people come together and become less than what they were separately. They subtract from one another. One and one making zero.”
His mother and father. On their own, decent people. Decent parents. Together: nothing he wanted in his life.
When she nodded in understanding, he continued. “Other times, two people in a relationship make nothing more than the sum of their parts. One plus one equals two.” He rested his fists on his hips and made himself say it. “But if I’m going to risk a relationship, I want something more. Something transformative. Not just a sum.”
She was listening so carefully, with no attempt to fill in words for him or interrupt, and it was just one more reason he needed to kiss her.
“I want a product. An exponent. I want one plus one to equal eighty, or a thousand, or infinity.” He shook his head, exasperated with himself. “It isn’t logical. I know that. My entire life, I’ve doubted that kind of partnership, that kind of love, even existed. I’ve never seen a hint of it. Not on any date I’ve ever had.”
Until nowwent unspoken.
With Poppy, he could glimpse the possibility of more.
His gaze dropped to her hand, because his reaction to her burn had been the first warning siren he’d actually acknowledged, the first unmistakable sign he could be transformed by her.
He stepped closer than necessary, closer than was wise. Closer, until her back was pressed against her shelves, her lips soft and parted, her breath hitching with each deliberate step he took.
If he gripped the shelves on either side of her, he could cage her with his body. Lower his open mouth to her jaw. Whisper hotly in her ear, then trace its curve with his tongue.
Instead, their only point of contact was comparatively innocent. His hold on her wrist, raising her hand for his inspection. She gasped at the contact, and he swayed even closer, until the brush of his knee against her thigh sent lightning arcing through his veins.
The burn was a faded pink spot now.
“Does this still hurt?” His voice was raspy and quiet, foreign to his ears.
She shook her head, round cheeks flushed with heat.
“Good.”
He turned her hand, exposing the cup of her palm and the pale, velvety skin of her forearm. Blue veins traced just beneath the surface of that skin, curving and branching like the ivy she’d doodled in her notebook.
Beneath his thumb, her pulse was rabbiting.
He slowly stroked that tiny, frantic beat. “Do I scare you?”
She shook her head again, then hesitated.
“Not…” When she licked her lips, he wanted to taste that pink tongue. “Not in that way. Not physically.”
He met her half-lidded gaze. “You scare me too.”
More truth, offered freely in the hush of a quiet, shadowed home, her bedroom barely more than a heartbeat distant.
He had thinking to do, and it wouldn’t happen with temptation inches away, all warm skin and lush curves and sharp eyes.
“Tonight’s a school night.” He inclined his head in a stiff little nod, released her hand, and stepped back. “I should head home.”
