Page 92 of The Best Shot

She crawled back onto the bed still mid-sentence, straddled my thighs, and kept going. Shaun this time. The things he’d said. The things he’d done. The way men like him always thought damage counted less if they were sorry afterward.

“You’d never do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Cheat.” A pause. “You flirt a lot. I don’t think you even know you’re doing it half the time. You’ll compliment Mrs. Collins’s hairdo, and she’s seventy, the same way you compliment the barista on her latte art. But you’d never do what my father did. What my brother did.”

“No,” I said. “I’d never do that to you.”

“I know,” she said, and there wasn’t a question in it.

Not I hope so. Not thank you. Just, I know. A fact she already trusted, not a thing she was deciding.

Her gaze drifted somewhere over my shoulder, and her fingers started up a small absent pattern against my chest.

She was right there in my arms and hadn’t made it back to me yet. So I moved.

I tipped her onto her back slowly, took both her wrists in one hand, and settled them above her head against the pillow.

She went still. Not tense. Present. There was a difference, and I felt the exact moment all that restless energy left her. One long exhale followed, like she’d been holding it for hours.

I stayed right there and let her breathe.

Her focus came back to my face.

There she was.

My grip tightened just a fraction before I caught it. Hard enough that I felt her pulse jump under my thumb.

“Sorry,” I said.

“It’s okay.” She’d relaxed into the hold, which was its own answer.

It hit me then, how glad I was to have her right here in front of me instead of on the other end of a phone, her state of mind something I had to guess at.

I dipped my head and brushed my mouth over hers. Barely there at first, then deeper, letting more of my weight settle.

Her hips rolled up into me.

I pressed her wrists firmer into the mattress, testing the hold, and felt her breath break against my mouth.

“Yeah. Thought so.”

I worked down her throat, teeth grazing just under her jaw. Her breath hitched.

It got to me, that sound. Fed something greedy in me.

“Ever been tied up?” I asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to be?”

She thought it through, cautious like she was about everything.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

“We’ll take it slow then. Call it an experiment.”