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But tonight, it doesn’t.
Tonight, it feels… safe.
Maybe because he did protect me, from Brad.
Maybe because after what Lucas did tonight, completely sober and without influence, Reign was the first person I thought of. The first person I wanted to see.
“Took my eyes off you for ten goddamn seconds,” he says finally, his voice pure gravel and jagged edges. “And the next thing I know my best friend isn’t there anymore and that fucker’s mauling you.”
My heart clenches in my chest and I bite my lip. “Thank you.”
His chest moves on a large breath.
“For saving me from Brad.”
Another large breath.
I don’t know why I say it then, but I feel like I have to. “I’m notyoursto protect though.”
And then, it looks like we’re breathing,existingas one.
If my breaths are shaky, his are shuddering.
If my heart is racing inside my chest, I can feel his pulse going hundreds of miles a second.
I bet his blood feels as hot as mine. His skin definitely feels as hot as mine.
And when he inches even closer, bringing his mouth only a hairbreadth away from me, I bet he feels something in his tight gut like I do in my soft belly.
Something writhing and twisting.
Swirling and swooping.
“You are,” he rasps.
I flinch. “What?”
Very hard.
There’s no way he didn’t notice that.
There’s no way heisn’tnoticing how my fingers have become claws now and how I’m dragging them over his pulse, his smooth, hot skin. How I’m scratching him and how I can’t stop.
Because look at what he’s doing to me.
Look at what he not only just said — the most bizarre words ever — but also the way he’s staring at me. At my face, all flushed and definitely pink; my trembling lips; the pulse at the base of my throat.
My dress.
God, the way that he stares at my dress, the parts that it covers and then the parts it doesn’t.
My heaving chest, my shoulders, my arms.
My legs.
And it’s all even more obscene than it was back there, back at St. Mary’s, by the side of the road.
Because he isn’t doing it to get a rise out of me.
