Page 63 of Wild Thorns

He touched my hair, briefly, before he left. Not romantic, exactly. More like someone checking to confirm I was still real.

"Lock your door," he said.

"Yeah, okay" I said even as I hated the feeling of moving backwards, of losing my newfound freedom and strength.

He turned to go, and I watched him move toward the stairs. I watched the way he held himself, all that warmth held tight, the careful restraint of a man who'd just listened to something terrible and swallowed his rage to give me what I needed instead.

And something broke loose in me. Not the fear, that was still there, a cold wire through my chest. But something alongside it. Something that recognized what Jasper had just done, the particular courage of sitting still, swallowing his rage, when everything in him wanted to fight, and wanted…

I wanted.

It was that simple, and that complicated.

"Jasper."

He stopped at the top of the stairs. Turned back. The porch light caught the line of his jaw, the question in his eyes.

"Stay," I said.

Not a question. Not a request. Something rawer than both.

He didn't move for a beat. Two. I watched him wrestle with something, with the same carefulness he'd shown all evening, the determination not to take advantage of a bad day.

"Serena," his voice was rough. "I… You—"

"I know." I stood up. The tea was going cold on the railing, and I didn't care. "I know the difference between wanting something and needing something, and I know you know it too." I stepped toward him. "This isn't about Marcus. This isn't about being afraid, although I admit I don’t want to be alone." Another step. Close enough now to see the way his breathing had changed. "But this is about the fact that I've wanted to touch you for weeks, and I'm tired of pretending that's not true."

His eyes went dark. Not dangerous, not the way Marcus's eyes had gone dark, calculating and possessive. This was different. This was heat, hunger, and the careful, almost painful restraint of a man waiting for permission he'd already been given.

"Say it again," he said.

"Stay… please."

He closed the distance between us.

His hands found my waist first, tentative, reading me, giving me every chance to change my mind. When I didn't, when I pressed closer instead, something shifted in him. Permission registered. His grip tightened, pulling me flush against his body, and the sound I made was not something I'd planned.

He was warm. That was the first thing, impossibly, almost feverishly warm, heat radiating through his shirt and into my palms where I'd pressed them flat against his chest. I could feel his heart under my right hand, hammering, and the knowledge that he was this undone from standing close to me was its own kind of power.

I had been a good hot minute since I'd wanted someone's hands on me. It had been at least a couple years since touch meant anything other than threat.

Jasper's hands meant something else entirely.

He kissed me on the stairs. Or I kissed him, the distinction blurred because we were both moving, both reaching, and when our mouths met, it was not gentle. There was nothing polite about it. I tasted tea… and want… and something darker, something that had been building through all those careful conversations and manufactured excuses to be near me. I opened my mouth, let him in and felt the groan that moved through his chest like a physical thing, resonant, real.

He pressed me back against the railing, and I went willingly. His thigh slid between mine, pressure and heat in exactly the right place, and my hips rolled against him before my brain caught up. His hands moved up my sides, thumbs tracing the curve beneath my breasts, asking a question.

"Yes," I said against his mouth. "God, yes."

He made a sound, low, strained, almost wounded, and his hands closed over my breasts through the thin cotton of my shirt, and I arched into the pressure of it, into the way his palms fit against me like he'd been thinking about this, mapping it out, imagining exactly how it would feel.

The stairs were narrow. Ridiculous place for this. I didn't care.

"Inside," Jasper said, and his voice had dropped into a register I'd never heard from him, stripped of charm, stripped of ease, down to something fundamental. "Serena. Let me take you inside."

I pulled him through my door by the front of his shirt.

We didn't make it far. The hallway, just a few steps past the threshold, was as far as we got before his hands were under my shirt and lifting, and I raised my arms and let the flimsy material flutter to the floor. I felt the cool air and then his mouth, hot and open, moving down my throat to my collarbone to the swell of my breast above my bra. His teeth grazed me there, light, questioning, and I fisted my hands in his hair and held him against me.