Page 8 of Reluctant Bride

“How very noble of you.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You contain a business degree and a body count.”

“Same thing, some weeks.”

It shouldn’t be funny. It is anyway, dry and quiet and delivered like he’s got all evening to be right about it, and I loosen before I can stop it, the same traitorous give that used to mean I was already lost.

I catch it. Just barely. I’m still in the chair, but my weight has already shifted forward onto the edge of it, an inch, maybe less, enough that I feel the difference when I sit back and don’t let it become a second inch.

He tracks it anyway. He always could, even when I thought I was being careful, some old fluency in me he never lost the alphabet for.

“You almost laughed,” he says.

“I did not.”

“You almost came out of that chair too.”

“I was reaching for the folder.”

“The folder’s right in front of you. You didn’t move toward it.” He says it without any heat at all, which is worse than if he’d been smug about it. “You moved toward me.”

He stands and the space between us drops from a table to a foot to nothing I can measure. I don’t look down. Looking down means admitting how close he’s let himself get.

I’m on my feet before I decide to be, because I’ll be damned if I let him tower over me.

His hand comes up, and I could step back. I don’t. I lift my chin instead, daring him to finish what he started, and his fingers find my jaw first, then trail lower, along the edge of it, to that spot just below my ear where every nerve I own apparently reports directly to him. I feel the difference in it this time, less restraint and more decision, like he’s not asking permission anymore so much as confirming I haven’t changed my mind.

Heat drops straight through me, fast and unfair, a current that skips every reasonable stop between my jaw and the ache building low in my stomach.

I want him. Badly. I haven’t stopped wanting him for one single day of the last eight years, no matter how many people I’ve positioned between us to prove otherwise. That’s the humiliating part.

Our mouths are close enough that I can smell his breath, mint over coffee, close enough that if either of us moved another inch this would already be happening instead of about to happen, and every part of my body that used to belong to this man is leaning into the inch without asking me first.

I don’t move the inch. I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt instead, holding him there, holding myself there, refusing to be the one who backs off first and refusing to be the one who finishes it either.

Neither does he.

His forehead drops to mine, and we stand there breathing the same air like two people standing at the edge of something neither one of us is willing to be the one who jumps.

“This is a bad idea,” I say, and my voice comes out rougher than I want it to.

“Which part?”

“All of it. Any of it.”

“Then say so.” His thumb moves once along my jaw, barely anything, and my pulse answers it like a struck bell. His voice has lost the bored edge it’s carried all evening, gone rough at the seams instead, each word landing like he had to pry it loose to get it out. “Tell me to step back, Sage. I will. Every time. That’s the whole point of the clause you just made me sign. I don’t get to decide that for you again.”

I should say it. The word is right there.

I don’t say it. I let go of his shirt instead, slow, deliberate, my own hands making the choice my voice won’t.

He steps back.

Not far. Just enough to put air between us again, just enough that I can breathe without breathing him in, and the fact that he’s the one who ends it instead of me feels like a verdict all by itself.

“There you go,” he says, and it’s the same three words from the tack room, except this time I can hear what saying them takes out of him.