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Reasongets swallowed up in a hot, sudden kiss courtesy of Jameson. I thought he was going overboard inside the jail, but the way he holds my face now makes every single memory from the cabin run through my mind at high speed, in supersaturated color.
His hands. His face. His voice. The way he touched me. The way he sent me past my outer limits and brought me back down again. The way he made me want him, which shouldn’t have been possible, and the way I felt likemyself.I’ve never felt more like myself before, except at The Membership. I didn’t know a man could do that.
I crane my neck an inch to get some air. “I’m still mad.”
“That’s okay.” He doesn’t call meangel,but when his mouth meets mine again, that’s what it feels like.
I break the kiss again. “I don’t forgive you.”
“Didn’t think you would.”
This time, when he comes back, his kiss feels like hope. It feels like the hope that we could get past this—the kidnapping, the jail, even his nightmares.
I’m already past the kidnapping.
No, wait—no, I’m not. It just feels like that because I was beside myself when he left, and I wantedthis.I wanted to kiss him and talk to him and figure him out.
Jameson licks into my mouth, and then there’s no room for analysis or rational thought in my brain.
Snowball tweets, louder and louder until Jameson pulls away with a frustrated groan. He turns his face to the side like he can’t stop kissing me otherwise.
“You should know,” he says, breath short, “that I wanted to stay with you. I thought this was better.”
It’s notI’m sorry, angel, I’ll never do something this foolish again, but it’s not nothing.
It’s also not enough to make this into a situation that I can make coherent decisions about right now. I need time and space for that. I need distance, because being this close to Jameson is making me feel overheated and tipsy and like I might blurt out another vacation proposal any second.
“It wasn’t better.” And there’s another pressing reason I spent time getting myself together enough to find which jail he’d been taken to and drive here and get him out. I had to stop on the way to buy a pair of leggings and tennis shoes so I didn’t look like I dressed entirely in his clothes. I’m not a hundred percent sure it would have mattered, but it felt like it might. “But I didn’t just come here to fight with you.”
He frowns. “Okay?”
I fight off a twinge of guilt that I stood here making out with him when there’s a family emergency going on and take his phone out of the pocket of my leggings. Jameson takes it gingerly, like it might bite him, and glances up at me, his brow furrowed.
I tilt my chin toward the phone. “They started texting right when the police got there. I tried to say something, but you were already gone, and the officers who interviewed me wouldn’t tell me anything.”
He swipes his thumb across the screen, expression blank.
It stays blank while the color drains out of his skin. He scrolls faster, racing through his notifications.
“What the fuck,” he says. “What thefuck.”
“I didn’t answer them. I didn’t—I tried not to read more than I had to.” Damn having a moral compass. What would it have mattered if Ididgo through his phone? Would I have made things more even between us. “I hope—”
“I have to go.”
Jameson turns his back, then wheels around again to pick up Snowball’s cage. His hands shake on the handle of the SUV’s back door, but he takes the time to put the cage squarely on the seat and buckle it in.
“Jameson—”
“Get in,” he barks.
I consider my options. My wallet is down at the bottom of my bag with my cards and a little cash, but with no phone, I’ll have to walk into the jail again or ask at nearby stores.
There are no nearby stores.
Jameson stops halfway into the SUV. “I can’t leave you here. You proposed, remember? Get in the car.”
Unlike the night he kidnapped me, I still have a choice. It might blow our cover as an engaged couple to walk away while he peels out of the parking lot, but Icouldleave.
