“I didn’t plan to stop.”
“Okay.”
She looks back at me. “You look different.”
Her gaze drops briefly to my arms, then she glances away. It’s fast enough to tell me she knows I caught it and that she is not entirely sure what to do with that.
My cock, traitorous prick that it is, reacts to that single glance as if we are not standing in the wreckage of every bad decision I’ve ever made in my life.
Heat moves through me the way it always did when I was with her. Fuck. Wrong time. Wrong place.
Right woman.
Always the right woman.
Something shifts in her expression, something complicated, and I watch it the way I have always watched her face, with the helpless attention of someone who learnt long ago that Skylar’s face was the most honest thing in any room she entered.
She folds her arms across her chest.
The movement draws my eyes down before I can stop them, and fuck, I try.
I genuinely try because I owe her respect and whatever she needs from me that is not this. But my eyes are bastards. They always have been when she is around. They drag over her anyway. The curve of her waist. The line of her throat. The careful, controlled rise and fall of her chest as she breathes a little too heavily. Even in work clothes, a narrow pencil skirt and a white blouse that does absolutely nothing to help me stay on the right side of this moment, she is still the most brutal kind of beautiful I’ve ever stood in front of. Not soft. Skylar has never been a pretty thing arranged on a shelf for looking at. She is a blade with a pulse. She always has been.
She catches me looking and lifts her chin. “Finished?”
“No.”
Her eyes flash, and there she is. The girl I loved. Right there, behind the composed, carefully held woman, burning exactly the same.
“You want to come in?” I ask.
She looks at me. “Do you want me to?”
There are a thousand answers stacked up behind my teeth.
Yes.
No.
Run.
Stay.
I want you nowhere near me because I ruin beautiful things when I get my hands on them, and you are the most beautiful thing I have ever been trusted with. I already proved what I do with trust.
I want to touch you. I want to fall at your feet and confess every ugly word I said in that visiting room until nothing remains between us but the truth and whatever you decide to do with it.
I want all those years back.
But none of that comes out.
“Yeah,” I say.
Her eyes hold mine for one more second.
“Okay.”
She steps farther inside.
