Page 113 of The Sweetest Return

I stared at the screen for a few seconds, my heart still caught on the last word.

Baby.

Warm.

Familiar.

Still sitting with me after the line went quiet.

I saved the number.

Dre.

No emoji. No joke after it. Just his name.

Then I lay there with the phone resting against my chest, the sheets twisted around my waist, my skin still alive from everything his voice had done to me. My room was quiet again. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that let a woman hear herself clearly.

And what I heard was not confusion.

That should have scared me more than it did.

My eyes landed on another thread.

Damien.

The softness in me shifted, but the guilt did not swallow me the way it might have yesterday. Whatever had been thinning between us before I came home was finally done. I had sent the words I should have sent sooner and stopped leaving the door cracked. He had been good to me. I could honor that without pretending there was still something between us to save.

Especially not from this bed while my fingers were still damp from another man’s memory.

Not from the wreckage of Dre making me cum before breakfast and then asking me, gently, if I was okay.

The clock read 8:31.

I had three hours before Dre wanted me downstairs.

And God help me, I wanted to be there.

Before Dre, football had been something other people got emotional about on Saturdays. Dating him had taught me enough to follow a game, yell at a bad block, and understand why a running back sometimes needed half a second of patience more than another burst of speed.

Today would be different.

He would not be on the field while I watched from the stands. He would be sitting beside me on purpose, after asking for me. After keeping my number. After remembering my body with enough tenderness to make pleasure feel like a conversation we had started years ago and somehow still knew how to continue.

A fresh pulse moved between my thighs.

I laughed under my breath and covered my face.

“Girl.”

Three hours was plenty of time to shower, get dressed, fix my face, and pretend I was not walking downstairs to meet a man who had just made my whole body answer him through a phone.

Probably not enough time to stop thinking about what Andre Jones’s mouth was going to do the next time we were alone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ireached the lobby five minutes early and still too late to get my mind right.

That was Imani’s fault.