Page 48 of One Step After Another

14.

Penny

PENNY figured she wouldbe able to do a few hours locked in a room with Luca. Maybe a night, even, if she had no other choice. But when it turned into two days of living and breathing in close quarters with a man who had decided to awaken a long-dormant part of Penny with nothing more than a kiss against a cold, hard brick wall ...

Well, she was going crazy.

And it was her own fault.

Because with nothing else to do but sit and wait for some kind of word or sign from her handlers at The League, all she was left with were her thoughts. Since she wasn’t the type to obsess over the things she couldn’t change—like the fact that what should have been a simple transaction went to total shit in the blink of an eye—she was stuck going over every minute detail of what happened between her and Luca.

It was unexpected.

But she liked it.

He’d apologized.

She hadn’t wanted him to.

Perhaps part of the problem was that she had gone years without any kind of physical intimacy with someone that she felt anything for on a personal level. Sex was a mechanical, chemical need that was easily fulfilled between humans, right? That, she could handle just fine and well. Except, apparently, when a man she had been attracted to for years decided to pin her against a wall, kiss the breath from her lungs, and touch her body with hands that promised they would learn every inch of her and enjoy doing it.

It wasn’t so mechanical, then.

Definitely still chemical.

And she was stupid.

Stupid to focus on how she could still feel Luca’s mouth against her own. Silken lips that made her feel hungry. Hands that grabbed just hard enough to wake up a need for more in the same way it spiked the part of her that was scared, too.

It lasted less than a minute and hadn’t been anything more than a way to escape a bad situation. A distraction for their pursuers to give them a little bit more time to get to safety. That was what she kept telling herself but it was a lie.

He had been hard when he was pressed up against her; a natural reaction, maybe, but she didn’t know any other man who got erections when they were seconds away from losing their life. And if his kiss had made her hungry, then he’d been ravenous. He hadn’t had to touch her the way he did, or keep a hand on her like he didn’t want to let go when the man finally opened the door, but he did.

And that was every reason why she kept obsessing over a single minute in her life that was already over. Something else she couldn’t change, sure, but she wasn’t capable of letting it go, either. Maybe because that one minute was something she had imagined time and time again when she was younger, stupider, and broken, but her imagination hadn’t done it justice.

She was weak.

That’s what it was.

Weak and dumb, and controlled by a part of her body that was practically useless to her at any other time.

It felt punishingly poetic that the easiest part of her old life to escape—a man she had felt nothing more than a young, girlish crush for—was the same thing that was now causing her more problems than she knew what to do with. In more than just the obvious ways, too. Or was that irony?

Penny didn’t know.

It wouldn’t help if she did.

“What are you doing up there?”

The question had Penny jerking back to the present in an instant. On top of the dresser, resting on her knees so that she could see out the small window, she was quite aware how she must look to Luca with the skirt of her dress hiked up around her hips so that she had more balance on the shitty furniture.

He probably had a partial view of her ass. Despite not wanting to feel embarrassed by that fact—it wasn’t like her body hadn’t been put on display before for various reasons—she still felt the blush creep up her throat into her cheeks.

More foolishness.

Every time he made a comment over the last two days that she could even slightly twist as suggestive, Penny did the same thing. Averted her eyes. Hid her face so that he couldn’t see the pink in her cheeks. Quieted. At least then, she wouldn’t make a fool out of herself. Because if she couldn’t get this stupid attraction under control, then she would make sure he didn’t know it existed in the first place.

Solid plan, her mind taunted. Another bitch in her life currently.