keep hearing him say that, You’re not being true to yourself, and it’s echoing in my mind. Now I’m wondering if maybe there’s something else that is missing from my life that I just can’t see. Does that make sense? Something that I do want, but I can’t see it?”
He sighed. She felt the motion of it, felt his chest rise and fall against hers and she had to bite back a whimper. Then he pressed a kiss to her temple. “You’ve spent so much of your life trying to control everything you could, Abby. There are probably a lot of things you want that you can’t see. Just . . . hell, just try not to worry. Let your life happen for a while.” Then his voice took on a teasing slant as he added, “After all, she who shall not be named can’t exactly come back into your life and take things over again, right?”
She laughed a little and lifted her head to look at him. “That’s true,” she murmured.
The breath caught in her lungs as their gazes locked.
Things that she wanted that she couldn’t see . . . Right now the problem was that she knew exactly what . . . no . . . she knew who she wanted. But it wasn’t a good idea . . .
He reached up and tugged on her hair. “So what’s the other thing you planned on doing, Abby?”
You.
The word almost jumped out of her. She had to fight to keep it locked inside and not just because it sounded trashier than hell. She wasn’t exactly planning on doing a man. She’d planned to have an affair. A torrid affair. With a hot guy.
Yet the only guy she could even imagine doing this with right now was Zach.
“Ah . . .”
That familiar smile of his, a little devious, a little wicked, curled his lips as he wound one of her curls around his finger. “What is it, Abby? You weren’t planning something really bad, were you? Going to rob a bank? Get a part-time job as a stripper?”
She snorted and eased back away from him, reminding herself that she needed to breathe. She needed to think. That was what she needed to do. “Sure, Zach. I’m going to become the Stripper Bank Robber. I’ll wear a mask and a G-string and pasties.”
“Can I be your getaway driver? I’d love to see this,” he teased, his voice husky.
And the look in his eyes was . . .
Whoa. Her mouth went dry and again, her skin felt all hot and tight. She couldn’t seem to suck in enough oxygen. “Well, you’ll just have to picture it your dreams. Stripping and bank robbing weren’t on the list.”
“I dunno . . .” A wicked light glinted in his eyes and he leaned in closer. “You look awful guilty, sugar. Just what else is on the list?”
Get up. Walk away. You need to think—
That voice, the voice of reason, the voice of sense, the voice she’d listened to her entire adult life, seemed to shriek at her, blaring a warning loud and long as she stared at him.
Another voice, sly and seductive, whispered, you said you’d stop worrying. You wanted to live . . .
* * *
The dark brown of her eyes seemed to burn as she stared at him.
Zach was torn between just closing the distance between them and just calling this whole idea off. More than seventeen fucking years, damn it. That’s how long he’d loved her and she’d never known.
But you’ve never told her.
Yeah, because she’d never seemed to—
Abby slid her off her stool.
Mentally, he sighed. Shoving a hand through his hair, he glanced away from her, tried to find something else to look at, focus on, think about. He’d been teasing her and pushing her as far as he figured he could go without saying outright, “I read the damn journal. If you have to have an affair, why not me?” But she wasn’t exactly following and—
Her hand touched his shoulder.
Zach looked back her. His heart seemed to jump up into his throat as she closed the distance between them.
Everything in the world faded away as she pushed up onto her toes.
And then, as she leaned in and pressed her lips to his, Zach realized this was what it was like to have a dream actually come true. As her mouth parted under his, he was almost certain he was dying. Maybe he’d already died. Yeah. He’d been eating something and