Page 54 of One Step After Another

“So what if—”

“Because there’s only one way this can end, and you know that. I’m going to disappear again. I have to. My job isn’t done, and it might never be. And you, well, you’re going to keep chasing me. Don’t you want something else—something more with someone who ... don’t you want to live?”

He blinked.

Again with those targeted words that he couldn’t deny or avoid.

“Why are you saying this?” he asked, stuck between the thumping pain in his heart, and his cock that had been hard from the second he kissed her again downstairs. “Why would you say these things to me now?”

Penny was a beautiful creature; it was impossible not to see all the reasons why when he was this close to her. The blue veins under the surface of her almost white skin. How the slight flush of pink traveled from her cheeks to her throat and even down under the tank top covering her chest. Without makeup, she looked like porcelain with blonde lashes and brows that framed the bluest eyes he had ever seen.

The curves that made up her body was a map he wanted nothing more than to learn with his tongue and his hands and his cock. She might have been damaged by her own hand—and by others, too—with scars he could see and even more that he couldn’t, but she was still perfect.

A living, breathing doll.

Except she wasn’t a doll.

She was right.

Until then, she hadn’t been real to him in a way. The idea of her had been something he felt like he was trying to save for his friend and sister. Nothing less, and nothing more.

But then she was.

She was more.

“Because who else will?” Penny asked. “Who else knows the truth to tell you it, Luca?”

“Stop it.”

The force of his words matched the strength in his hands when he squeezed her wrists tighter against the wall and stepped closer. Crowding her space until their lips were a breath away and their noses touched.

She stared him down, though.

Unafraid.

He liked that, too.

Luca wished he didn’t.

“Just stop—”

“No,” she replied softly. “I won’t. Ever. Because neither will you.”

He hated that she was right. Even more, he hated that he didn’t care because it made no difference to what he would do after this. She had to know it, too.

Luca didn’t get the chance to tell Penny that, though, because in the next breath she was kissing him. Her lips locked against his as her fingernails dug into the sides of his hands almost painfully when his palms slid from her wrists to hold tight. His tongue flicked against the seam of her mouth, and when she opened to let him deeper, everything else faded away.

His ability to breathe.

Her words that hurt.

The hallway around them.

It all went away when he kissed her, letting go of her hands to drag his palms down the skin of her inner arms that felt like a patchwork from the multitude of scars. And yet, she was still as soft as silk, too. Her body arched into his, hiding nothing. Her thighs trembled when they opened to get more of him against her.

He gave her that, too, driving their bodies together like the two of them were teenagers getting their first taste of something sinful. Grinding against her until his balls ached with the need for more, and she was panting into his kiss almost ready to plead.

He doubted she would.