Love Triangle Six Books of Torn Desire - Willow Winters Page 0,160

the high, lace-trimmed bed. It should be incongruous, a rough man against something so delicate. It should be ridiculous, instead of like he belongs there. “Do you know, I thought you were in love with Christopher? When I first met you?”

My throat is suddenly dry. We can invest money and destroy buildings. We can change the landscape of a city, but God, not talk about our feelings. That isn’t how it’s done.

Sutton doesn’t care how things are done.

“You could have asked,” I manage to say, my voice only a little shaky. “I would have set you straight. There’s nothing between us.”

He laughs, the white of his teeth bright in the quiet shadows. Only a small lamp on the nightstand lights the room, and it can’t compete with Sutton. “There’s something between you. But it’s the same way you couldn’t see the table and the walls. You didn’t know me then.”

And he knows me now.

I’m afraid to ask. It’s really better if I don’t know the answer, if I only wonder and worry forever, but whenever there’s trouble, I have a way of falling into it. “So what’s between us?”

“Oh, lots of things. Probably love is one of them. Hate, too. Those things go together more than they should. But damn, there’s a boatload of chemistry between you two.”

There’s chemistry here, crackling in the air between Sutton and me.

“We’ve never—”

“Of course not. Anyone can see that. Christopher wouldn’t be walking around trying to tear apart the world with his bare hands if you had. Only a certain amount of denial feels good. The rest just fucking hurts.”

I lick my lips, and his gaze tracks my tongue. “Which one was the hallway?”

Only then do I realize I’ve been walking toward him, walking closer without realizing it. Almost two feet away right now. He’s a burning sun, and I’ve been cold for so long.

“It hurt,” he says, soft and almost dangerous, “reading the text.”

He isn’t diminished by telling the truth. That’s a trick I’d like him to teach me. It doesn’t make him seem weak, that he’s been hurt. Not with his shoulders this broad and his hands this scarred.

It makes me seem powerful, instead.

Powerful enough that I can reach out and touch him—the backs of my fingers against the scruff of his cheek. Soft when I stroke down. Prickly when I push back up. There’s terrain to be explored, to be tested against the will of my body.

My voice comes out a whisper. “I think you did come to say goodbye.”

Not with words.

His eyes tell me no, that he’s not giving up on this, but his body leans into me. That’s something you don’t think about, that the sun doesn’t just burn. It wants to warm you. I let my hand fall to the angle of his jaw, to the place where his shirt opens and reveals bronze skin.

I close my eyes, letting myself feel the joy that threatened when I heard the knock. If I’m honest with myself, there had been joy when I sent the text—thinking he would come for me. Hoping he would. If I could believe in love and trust and sex, if I thought any of it could last, I would have done more than hope. I’ve seen where it leads, and I don’t want to do that to him.

Maybe we can have one night.

You don’t face a lifetime of humiliation and hurt after one night, do you?

His eyelids are heavy now, because he knows what happens next. Some part of him came here to do this with me, because it might be the last chance. It could be the last time I see him, which makes my chest hollow out. That’s the empty space where promises could go.

He hooks two fingers in the waistband of my shorts, bringing me flush against his body. My stomach sucks in and then out, in and out, in and out, sensitive skin brushing bare knuckles. “Are you nervous?” he asks, his voice calm and deep.

It makes me laugh, how un-nervous he seems. I’m made up only of nerves, strung together with dreams and desire and a penchant for trouble. “We’re going to do it in a bed, after all.”

A small laugh. “To spice things up,” he says, echoing me.

The words seem less like a joke now. More prophetic. The library counter had been spontaneous and wild. This is different, almost unbearably intimate.

This close I can see the pale striations set into his blue eyes. I could dabble in a thousand