I looked at her.
She looked back, and there it was again—that thing she kept doing, dropping her eyes to my mouth and catching herself, pink in her cheeks, sitting very still on that barstool like she was afraid of what she’d do if she moved.
Curious, I thought. She wascurious.
That was the most dangerous thing she could possibly be.
“Someone you probably shouldn’t be alone with,” I said. “At midnight on a school night. In an empty bar.”
She swallowed.
“Okay,” she said. And didn’t move an inch.
Damn it…damn it, I was giving her an out. I needed her to take it. Needed her to be sensible.
She wasn’t going to be sensible.
I could see it all over her—the set of her shoulders, the way she was looking at me, the fact that she’d been sitting on that barstool for three hours telling me things she probably hadn’t told anyone since she got to this town. She hadn’t come in here looking for this. But she’d found it anyway and she knew it and so did I.
I should have told her to go home.
I thought about her fucking asshole ex. About some man who’d had five years of her and ended it over a phone call. About the way she’d looked when she walked in here—like someone had taken something from her, like she couldn’t remember what she was worth.
I thought about how she’d looked up at me on the first day of school and smiled like it was easy.
I thought about the tattoo.
“Maggie,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I need you to make a decision.”
She blinked. “What decision?”
“You know what decision.”
The bar was dead quiet. She held my gaze and I watched her think it through—the reasons, the complications, the very long list of things that made this a terrible idea. I watched her get through all of them.
“What if I’m asking?” she said.
Every muscle in my body went taut. “Are you? I need to hear it.”
She bit her lip. “I…I want to know what they’re talking about. The Nash Effect. I want…I want a taste.”
Fucking hell, a goddamntaste. I knew exactly what she’d taste like. Orange juice, sunshine, sex.
I was already getting hard. Fuck me.
I came around the bar…Maggie tracking me the whole way, turning on the barstool to face me, opening her legs like an invitation. I stepped between her knees and looked down at her, and I thought,she’s too young.
But then I leaned forward and boxed her in.
She inhaled a sharp breath.
“Last call,” I said. “You walk out of here…or you stay the night.”
Her breath was ragged, rough. “But—don’t you have to go home to Nell?—”
