Page 57

“Nope.” She was moving before the word was finished. “Okay. That was—no. I’m going to bed.”

“Wait.”

“Forget I said that. Please. I’m going to go, and you’re going to ignore me, and tomorrow we are both going to have been extremely tired.” She pulled the ice off my face and swung toward the sink, fast, and she cut so close past my knee that the hem of the jersey dragged across my forearm.

My hand left my thigh and closed around her wrist.

There was nothing considered about it. I’d run a careful operation since she moved in, and I didn’t run one second of this.

She stopped. She didn’t pull. She stood there with a bag of ice in one fist and my grip around her other wrist, and she waited, and her breathing had fallen apart. Her pulse slammed under my thumb.

“I’m not going to ignore you,” I said.

“Eli.”

“You asked me a question.”

She closed her eyes.

“Yes,” I said.

She loosened all over. Her shoulders dropped and her weight shifted off her feet and onto the wrist I was holding.

“Look at me.”

She looked at me.

“Put the ice down.”

She put the ice down. She didn’t set it on the counter so much as get rid of it, blind, and it tipped over on the granite and started melting into the towel. I let it melt.

I took her by the waist and pulled her down into my lap.

She came fast and she didn’t stop halfway, one leg and then the other over my thighs, her toes hooked on the rung of the stool, and she put all her weight down on me. I had my hands at her waist under the hem of the jersey, on skin, and she pulled a breath in through her teeth when they landed.

I was hard before she got there, and I didn’t try to hide it.

She knew the instant she settled. She stopped moving, right down on top of it. Her weight drove the seam of my suit pants up into me. The heat of her came through the wool and the leggings both, and it took the rest of the room out.

I held her there. I had one hand at the small of her back and the other spread across her thigh, and I didn’t let her move, and I didn’t kiss her.

What I wanted was a fist in her hair and her mouth where I put it and all of it at a pace I picked. I was a big kid at twelve and a strong man by fifteen, and I’d been careful about it ever since, and I wasn’t about to quit paying attention with her in my lap.

Her palms flattened against my shirt, both of them, open, and she left them there. Her face was inches off mine. Her hair hung forward on both sides and shut the light out between us.

“Delaney.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want me to take what I want?”

Her breath left her in a rush across my lips.

“I don’t…” She stopped and started over. “You mean…”

She couldn’t get a sentence out. She’d sat across a table from me and waited me out until I said yes to every term she wanted, and now she couldn’t put four words in a row.

I got a real grip on her hips then, both hands, and pulled her down flush against me and didn’t let her up. My thumbs found the points of her hip bones through the leggings and dug in.