his doubtless guilty. To his surprise, she didn’t look away. Instead, she bit her lip. His hand must have been under someone else’s control, because before Nate knew it he was sliding his thumb over the curve of her mouth, smoothing away the line she’d left in her earthy lipstick. His palm cradled her face, the evidence of his bad behaviour staining the pad of his thumb cinnamon.
This was what happened when he crossed mental lines; physical lines followed. He’d let himself acknowledge this attraction instead of folding it up and shoving it into a box, and now she knew. He’d sell his soul just to put his mouth on her, and now she knew. Or at least, he thought she did.
“Nate?” Hannah frowned. She didn’t sound horrified. Or terrified. Or happy. She sounded completely and utterly confused.
Which was both unexpected and extremely convenient. If Hannah somehow didn’t understand what was going through his mind right now… well, maybe he could make it so that she never would. Because it was one thing to want her, but it was another thing entirely to burden her with the knowledge.
So, with worryingly little effort, Nate shut down. He pulled up his old mask of casual mocking, the one that convinced everyone he was too cool to care and too wild to be cared for. He stepped back abruptly, practically jerking away from her touch. She wobbled for a moment, losing the support of his shoulders, and his heart clenched. But then he reminded himself that she was perfectly capable of standing alone—that she would want to stand alone, if she knew what he was thinking.
“You should be more careful,” he said, trying not to wince at the coldness in his own voice.
Her brows rose, and her cheeks hollowed as if she’d sucked them in. “With what?”
“That.” He nodded sharply toward the chair she’d been standing on. “You’ll break your bloody neck. Don’t do it again.” Don’t trust me again. Don’t touch me again. And don’t ever, ever let me touch you.
Her nostrils flared slightly, her eyes narrowing, but for some reason she held back her irritation. No; not some reason. She held it back because they weren’t at school, and she wasn’t just some woman he watched with interest from afar. She was his employee, and she was cautious around him.
He had power over her, and she remembered that, even if he didn’t.
What the fuck had he been thinking?
Guilt flooded him, every inch of his body tensing, his mind a screaming hive of pressure and pain and that infuriating lust. “What?” he asked tightly, even though she hadn’t said a word. He wanted her to say something. He wanted her to lose her temper and snap at him, because he deserved it even more than she knew.
Instead, after a long, heavy breath, she gritted out, “I’m going to the supermarket.”
Her shoulders were stiff as she left. The fact that she’d abandoned a chair out of place and left her sunshine yellow duster on the cabinet told him, better than anything else, that she was furious.
But at least she was angry because he’d been awful, not scared because he wanted her. At least she hadn’t noticed the lust ripping through him like a forest fire. At least she’d never know that he’d come perilously close to kissing her nose or burying his face between her legs, or something else—the urges were all wildly divergent, as well as horribly impossible.
And she hadn’t detected a single one.
He’d gotten away with it. Thank fuck.
9
Nate had not gotten away with it. Twenty minutes later, Hannah pushed her trolley through Ravenswood’s tiny, overpriced supermarket and pondered the undeniable fact that Nathaniel Davis wanted to fuck her.
She didn’t think she was being presumptuous. It was obvious that he wanted to sleep with her, and painfully obvious that he was horrified by the fact—which Hannah was used to. She’d had many people recoil from her as they realised that, through some twisted miscommunication between mind and body, they’d developed lust toward a woman they didn’t even like.
But Nate does like me.
Obviously not enough. No-one you want ever does.
Hannah squashed that second, pitiful voice grimly. She reminded it in stern and unyielding tones that she was attractive, occasionally amusing, and undeniably useful. Eventually, someone would want her. They wouldn’t stumble into a grey and plodding relationship with her; they wouldn’t sleep with her on a semi-regular basis until her personality became too much to bear; they’d want her.