Page 19 of Never Enough

But I don't.

I just lie there.

And somewhere between deciding not to move and the slow exhale that follows, my hand drifts. Not on purpose—or maybe it is, maybe my body has simply stopped pretending it has any sense of self-preservation. My knuckles come to rest in the narrow strip of mattress between us. Not reaching. Not asking for anything. Just there.

Neither of us speaks.

And then⁠—

The smallest thing.

Her pinky finger brushes against mine. Once. A whisper of a touch so light I might have imagined it. Except I know I didn't. Because every nerve ending I have just short-circuited at once and I am not a man who imagines things like this.

I don't move.

I don't think I breathe.

I just let it happen. Let our fingers rest against each other in the dark, this smallest possible point of contact, this centimeter of skin that somehow holds the weight of twenty years. How I used to chase her around holding frogs and trying to make her squeal. And how she once fell asleep with her head on my shoulder when she was over for a movie night at my parents’. And now she’s this woman who is currently wrecking me without even trying.

chapter

seven

Gracie

His mouth is on my neck.

That's the first thing I notice. The warm, deliberate press of his lips against the place where my pulse lives, just below my jaw, just above my collarbone. I’m pretty sure I’ve never given that spot on my body much consideration until this very moment. Until Henry’s breath ghosts across it and every nerve ending in my body stands up and pays attention like they've been called by name.

His hand is on my hip. Not resting. No, he grips my flesh tightly. Fingers press into the curve of me through thin cotton, pulling me closer, erasing the space between us with a slow, purposeful drag until my back is flush against his chest. I can feel every inch of him—the hard planes of his stomach, the solid width of his ribs, the unmistakable heavy ridge of his erection at my backside. Every place I feel the heat of him searing me, like a brand.

“Gracie.” His voice is low. Rough. Wrecked in a way I've never heard it. As if he’s been holding my name in his mouth for years and he's finally letting it go. “Come here.”

But I’m already there. So close, it feels like we’re breathing as one.

He says it again, though. “Come here.” Then his hand slides from my hip to the bare skin of my stomach, palm resting against the curve of my belly. My spine arches on instinct, pressing back into him, and he makes a growling sound against the back of my neck.

His thumb traces the line of my lowest rib. Slow. Torturous. The kind of deliberate movement that means he knows exactly what he's doing and he's planning to take his time doing it. His mouth drags higher to my earlobe, then up to the shell of my ear, where it’s nice and sensitive. His teeth catch, just barely, just enough to make everything south of my belly button dissolve into liquid heat.

“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs.

“I don’t want you to stop,” I breathe.

“Thank fuck.” His hand slides up my shirt and palms one of my bare breasts. I arch into his touch and he rewards me by pinching my nipple and rocking his erection against my ass.

I moan and the sound jars me. Now, I'm awake.

My eyes snap open. My heart thunders inside my chest.

I’m in Henry’s bed.

My pulse is hammering. Not the sleepy, disoriented thump of someone startled awake by an alarm or a noise or the standard-issue anxiety dream about showing up to a health inspection naked. This is the hard, driving, full-body percussion of a woman whose subconscious just staged a one-act play that would make a romance novelist blush, and whose body has not yet received the memo that it was fictional.

I'm hot. Everywhere. The sheet is tangled around my legs like I've been fighting it, and my sleep shirt has ridden up to my waist, and there is a very specific, very insistent ache between my thighs that I am absolutely, categorically not going to think about.

Then I realize the source of my heat. Henry’s big body presses against my back, one heavy arm slung over my body, his palm resting against the rounded part of my stomach.

It’s perfectly normal. People shift in their sleep. Gravitate towards warmth.