“You dislike the man before you, and the boy you used to be friendly with is gone. You are using me as nothing more than a distraction for your own problems. Decide what you want, Tessa, and leave me be.”
“No, that is not it at all!” Her face screwed up, eyes gleaming.
“Then what is it, Tessa?”
“You aremine!” She bit her lip as if she’d not meant to let those particular words in that particular order escape.
He was glad they had.
“Say it again,” he demanded.
She shook her head.
He stepped closer, his voice harder. “Say it again.”
She pressed her back against the stall wall, attempting to gain distance when there was none. “All these years, I have been thinking of you a certain way, thinking of you in our woods, on our rock, in all our little corners, and even though I knew you’d moved to London and opened a theatre, I did not consider how that might change you, make you into a different Remmy than before. When… when I need the old one so badly.” Her hands made little white-knuckled fists at her sides, and she lifted her chin. “I need the boy who befriended a lonely girl and loved her like a sister.”
Like a sister.He’d reached the edge of his control, stared off the edge into the unknown. “You, sweetheart,are missing some crucial details where I’m concerned. Now go court a vicar and make your choice.”
When she didn’t move, he wrapped his hands around her upper arms, his knuckles scraping against the wood behind her. He held her gently, rubbing his thumbs back and forth. “Neither of us can be who we used to be. But that is not a bad thing. We never used to touch like this.”
Her breath hitched.
His too, but he kept talking because she kept following him and kept letting him touch her and kept enjoying it, and how could he stop himself when she—hell—might want him back.
He rested his forehead against hers. “I like to touch you like this, and”—he released her only to place his forearms against the wall on either side of her head—“I think you like it, too.”
Their heavy breaths mingled in the slim space—continuously shrinking—between them.
Her eyes closed, pressing tightly together, and when she spoke, her voice was strained, as if she barely contained a flood of emotions ready to drown them both. “I do.” The smallest whispered words.
But they swept him into a kiss, diving in with his tongue to taste her. Jam and tea and lemon. Summer sweetness. Her lips were more intoxicating than the wine that had led to the first kiss, and they opened so sweetly, so readily for him.
She slid her hands around his neck, holding him steady and close with no signs of letting go.
He yanked her bodice down and swept her nipple into his mouth, sucked to the music of her gasp.
“Do you like this?” he asked, teeth grating against her soft skin.
“Yes.” The word a shiver.
He dropped to his knees. “I wanted to do this to you last night, and I think you would have let me.”
She opened her eyes, and he saw the truth there. Shewouldhave let him.
“I think you crawled into bed with an ache between your legs.”
“I did,” she breathed.
“I was going to help you with that before we were interrupted. I was going to slip my finger into your cunny and stroke you till you screamed.”
Her eyelashes fluttered gold against her cheeks. Teeth sank into the plump curve of her lower lip. She was aroused.
“Did you sleep fitfully with that space between your legs buzzing? Because ofme?”
A little noise caught in her throat.
“Tell me,” he demanded.
