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She was still gasping and trembling as I reached for her, flipping her onto her stomach, then pulling her back onto all fours before surging deep inside her again.

The sound that escaped her was almost a cry as she angled her upper body downward, getting the angle just right.

My hands settled at her hips, using them to slam her back into me as I thrust.

“No,” I said when she pressed her face into the sheets, muffling her cries.

My hand tracked up the back of her neck, grabbing a handful of her hair, and pulling back.

“I want to hear every sound you make when I’m inside of you.”

She wasn’t holding back then as she cried, whimpered, begged, mindless with her need.

Her walls tightened around me as the first wave threatened to crest, the pressure becoming intoxicatingly cruel. But then she was gasping as the pleasure washed through her.

This time, she took me with her, the release making my vision flicker around the edges as pleasure coursed up my spine.

Maggie went boneless then, falling onto her side, knees up near her chest as she tried to catch her breath.

Looking down at her, there was a strange, warm, spreading sensation in my chest.

My hand went there, confused.

I recognized the sensation the way you recognize a song you haven’t heard in a long time. Distantly. Then all at once.

I tried to catalogue it the way I cataloged everything—coolly, clinically, at a distance.

It didn’t help.

It was warm regardless of how I tried to analyze it.

It was warm and it was hers… and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that.

There was a word for it.

I’d heard it and seen it too many times to count.

In poetry, music, fiction.

But I refused to use it.

Because it wasn’t possible.

This time, it was me who pulled away, walking into the bathroom, closing the door, and stepping into the shower.

I spent the next several moments trying to pretend that the feeling in my chest had never existed at all.

When I stepped out and dried off, though, it was still there. Still demanding notice.

I made my way back into the room to find Maggie gone and the adjoining door not only closed but locked.

Then I spent the next several hours lying awake trying to tell myself it was for the best.

But if it was for the best, then why did it suddenly feel like a hole had been punched through my chest?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

[ “REGRET IS A memory with teeth.”