"That's the first honest thing you've said to me since this morning."
"That's not true." His mouth opens on the next word, then closes. A man who always has the next sentence ready just swallowed one whole.
"Prove it."
He comes around the counter. I don't step back, because stepping back tells him something I'm not willing to tell him yet. He stops close enough that the heat of him reaches me, and his hand finds the edge of the counter beside my hip, his knuckles grazing my jeans.
"I'm not the one who tried to kill you on that pass," he says. "I've spent all day trying to prove that the answer isn't the one I think it is."
"Ward."
He doesn't flinch. He doesn't confirm. The silence does both.
"And you're here," I say. "In my mother's kitchen. Instead of his."
"Yes."
"That's either the bravest thing you've ever done or the dumbest."
"Probably both."
I study him. The lamplight cuts across the planes of his face and leaves the hollows dark. I look for the seam where theperformance meets the man, the place where a lie would live if he were carrying one.
He holds still and lets me look. A man with something to hide would fill this silence with reassurance, and Callum gives me nothing except the weight of his attention and the steady, measured rhythm of his breathing.
It isn't enough. Words and silences and the careful composure of his face can all be managed. Callum Aldrich manages things for a living. If I want to know whether the man who laid out a careful lie in my dining room is building me another one now, I need to get past the parts of him he controls.
I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt and pull.
The kiss is not soft. It's not the hallway kiss from the night in the rain, the one that cracked us both open.
This kiss is a negotiation conducted with teeth and breath and his hand closing around the back of my neck, tilting my head where he wants it. His grip hasn't gentled since the last time he put his hands on me. His body against mine is coiled with a tension that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with control held past its breaking point.
My back meets the counter. His hands find my waist and lift, and I'm sitting on the old countertop with his hips between my knees before the kiss breaks. His palms slide up under my shirt, fingers spread wide against bare skin, thumbs tracing the undersides of my breasts through the thin cotton of my bra. The deliberateness of it, the way he maps terrain before he takes it, makes my breath go shallow.
"Still testing?" he asks against my jaw.
"Still watching."
"Good." His teeth find the tendon below my ear. The bite is controlled and precise. "Watch closely."
He pulls my shirt over my head. His knuckles brush the bruise on my collarbone where the seatbelt dug in this morning,and he pauses. His thumb traces the edge of the mark, the purple-blue bloom across the skin. His jaw sets. Then his mouth lowers to the bruise and presses against it, careful, at odds with the way his hands are already reaching behind me for the clasp of my bra.
"Somebody put that on you," he says against my skin. Not a question.
"Somebody put me on a road this morning. The seatbelt did the rest."
His fingers unhook the clasp with the efficient certainty of a man who intends to take his time with what's underneath it. Cool air tightens my nipples, and he looks. That unhurried cataloguing attention that makes me feel mapped and memorized and very specifically wanted.
"You're staring."
"I'm deciding where to start."
His mouth lowers to my breast, and the heat of it after the cold air bows my spine. His tongue circles the peak with slow, firm pressure while his hand cups the other, thumb sweeping across the nipple in strokes that match the rhythm of his mouth. When he switches sides, the cool air on wet skin draws a sound from me that I'd rather not have made.
"Don't hold back on my account," he says, and I can feel his mouth curve against my skin.
"Don't flatter yourself."
