Except it was.
A week would once have meant nothing to me. Now the thought of seven days without seeing her felt like something lodged under my skin, impossible to ignore and worse the more I thought about it.
“Emily.”
She looked back up.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly, though it clearly wasn’t. “It’s Thanksgiving. People go home.”
People.
Not men like me. Not men with my life, my name, my obligations, my lies.
I looked away first. Another second of holding her gaze like that and I would do something reckless.
The silence inside the car deepened. It wasn’t awkward. It was worse than that. It was full. Heavy with everything neither of us had said, and with the increasingly dangerous fact that I wanted her more with every passing second.
Then she reached for me.
Her hand came to my jaw lightly at first, fingertips brushing my skin with enough hesitation to tell me she would stop if I pulled away. She was giving me the choice.
I turned my face into her palm before I could stop myself.
Her breath caught.
For one suspended second, she just looked at me. Her eyes moved over my face as if she were memorizing something. Then she leaned in and kissed me.
The first touch of her mouth on mine was soft, tentative, careful.
It still hit me like violence.
Every muscle in my body locked. My hand gripped the steering wheel hard enough to ache, and for half a second I did nothing but feel it. Her lips, warm and slightly parted. The faint taste of red wine and sugar. The soft exhale against my mouth when I finally kissed her back.
After that, control became a far less stable thing.
I let go of the wheel and caught the side of her face, pressing my thumb just under her jaw as I angled her toward me and took the kiss deeper. She made the smallest sound, barely more than a breath, but it went straight through me, hot and immediate, settling low in my body with brutal efficiency.
Christ.
I had wanted this.
I had not understood how much.
My other hand slid to the back of her neck, into the silk of her hair, holding her with just enough pressure to keep her there while I kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, learning the shape of her mouth with a greed I was no longer interested in disguising. She tasted warm and sweet and entirely too easy to lose myself in.
When her fingers slid from my jaw into my hair, my restraint snapped another inch.
I dragged her closer without thinking, my hand cupping the nape of her neck as I kissed her harder. She shifted toward me with a helpless little movement that put the line of her body closer to mine, and the contact was enough to send a sharp wave of heat down my spine. My pulse had become a riot. My thoughts had ceased to be useful.
I wanted her.
I wanted to pull her across the console and into my lap. I wanted to taste every sound she was trying not to make. I wantedthe soft blue dress I’d spent half the evening pretending not to notice gone and my mouth in its place.
That thought hit me so hard I had to break the kiss before I disgraced myself entirely.
I pulled back with real effort, breathing harder than I cared to admit.
For a moment neither of us moved.
