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She stood up and faced Micah, the steel of the door between them.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“So do I,” she said, leaning against the door. “Can I go first? Otherwise, I’ll never say it.”
“Yeah,” he said, subdued in the moonlight. “Go ahead.”
“There’s no way you would have known this when you called me to get you out of jail, but it was exactly what I needed. I was stuck, Micah. I was stuck and I was scared, and you pushed me right back into living. I’d sort of resigned myself to just being that woman whose fiancé died in that crash. And the woman who forgave the driver that killed him and Bea’s mom and Jonah and Daphne’s daughter. I was surviving in pieces, and you came along and put me back together.”
There’d been thousands of words written about his face and she’d read a lot of them. His serious eyes. His lush mouth. The bad-boy scar. But in person he was so much more. He was more than his looks. More than his music. More than his band. More than his complicated relationship with his brother.
She reached up and touched the scar on his face, her fingertip tracing the raised, jagged line.
“Did it hurt?” she asked. He nodded.
“Was it scary?” He nodded again.
“And now everyone just thinks it’s sexy,” she said.
The world saw him in pieces, too.
She saw the whole of him.
He pulled her around the door and then shut it, quietly. He leaned back against the car and settled her body against his. She took a breath, and then he did, and they were working in tandem. Fuck, this intimacy she’d been so scared of, now she craved it. Wanted it with every part of her body.
“I’ve texted Jo,” he said, his voice a low murmur, his eyes on hers and then dipping to her mouth and then up to the pile of hair on her head, and she got the sense that he was memorizing her the same way she was memorizing him.
He, too, was already saying goodbye.
“She’s sending a car to get me at six tomorrow morning.”
“Really?” She couldn’t hide her disappointment and then felt ridiculous. “Of course,” she said and attempted to step back, but he didn’t let go. “You have so much to get back to.”
Nothing had to be strange about this except for the way her body was going berserk. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted to taste him. Hold him tight. Pull off those clothes and run her hands over his body the way he’d run his over hers the previous night. She wanted every pleasure he’d given her to be returned in kind.
She wanted him. Badly.
And holding all that desire in her body and not doing anything about it was hard. She felt like all her wiring was wrong. She trembled in the cool air against his warm body, clutching her self-control and self-respect.
And then he kissed her. His hands spread wide against her back, his fingertips pressing against her clothes and into her skin until she was flush against him. She gasped and he swept his tongue into her mouth. Consuming her. And she moaned, high and wild, clutching him to her.
It wasn’t a kiss, it was a fevered goodbye. It was a painful wish. It was restraint and abandon and she was dizzy with want.
He tore his mouth away, pressed his forehead against hers.
“Christ, Helen,” he breathed. “I want you.”
“I want you, too.”
But her daughter was in the car. And there wasn’t anywhere for this desire to go. And she was just coming back to herself. And he had a whole life to get back to. A band and a tour and Madison Square Garden.
Reason swept in.
“I have to go,” she finally forced herself to say. And then she forced herself to step back. Her hands slid over his shirt, memorizing the feel of his muscles and bones. “My daughter.”
“Of course.” He stepped back too. Giving her all the room she needed.
“Don’t forget the picnic,” she said, and he laughed.
“I can’t remember where we landed with all that blackmail. I think I’m setting up chairs?”
She laughed, but she felt like crying. “I’ll send you an email.”
“And you have my number.”
Yeah. She did. She had Micah Sullivan’s number.
She opened the driver-side door. The keys, as the family had grown used to doing over the years so people could move cars and leave when they needed, were tucked under the mat.
She pressed her hand to the window and he smiled. And maybe she was flattering herself but she thought he looked sad too. Sad she was leaving. That this was over.
And then, because her daughter was sleeping in the back and her life pulled her ever forward, she drove away.
As predicted, Bea woke up on the stairs going up to her bedroom.
