Sinners' Playground (The Harlequin Crew #1) - Caroline Peckham Page 0,118

me alongside everything he remembered, and I was sure I was looking at him in the exact same way.

"I've always wondered if you really were the most beautiful girl I've ever met, or if I'm just biased because I've seen how deep that beauty runs," he said, his voice full of grit and regrets. "And now that I find myself looking at you again, I've realised it doesn't matter if I'm biased. You're everything I've always been missing Rogue. And I'm so sorry about what happened between us. I can only promise you I thought it was the best thing at the time and I've regretted it every single day since."

Something cracked and split apart deep inside me at his words as I looked into his dark eyes and tried to think of the right words to give him back. I should have been telling him it was too late, I didn't care about his apologies or regrets or any of it. But I didn't think I'd ever actually expected any of them to say sorry for it. I'd never believed they could feel that way at all. And definitely not as deeply as JJ clearly felt it.

My gaze slipped from his eyes to his lips and I found myself aching for something I shouldn't have been. Something I needed to save myself from before I fell too deep and couldn't ever come back from.

JJ swallowed thickly, leaning back an inch and looking down at our bodies, the shirt I was wearing showing the hard press of my nipples through it as clearly as the thick length of his cock which was driving into my thigh.

"Will you stay with me tonight?" he asked in a low voice.

"JJ, I-"

"I don't want sex. Despite what my dick might have to say on the matter and how much a part of me might ache for that. But I'd just sleep better with you in my arms tonight, like we used to do at Sinners’ Playground and the summer house. If you want to?"

Water slid down my cheeks like tears and I should have been refusing but instead I was nodding, letting him draw me out of the shower and peel my wet t-shirt off to reveal my body to him. I should have been covering myself up, refusing to let him see me like that, but somehow the rules seemed different tonight and I didn’t feel like questioning that.

He looked at me with a savage hunger in his gaze that made my pulse race and every muscle in my body clench with anticipation before quickly wrapping a towel around me to cover me up once again.

I dropped my gaze as I focused on drying myself and he grabbed a towel for himself, the two of us looking away from one another as we fought off the heat that was building in the room.

JJ headed back into his bedroom and by the time I followed him, he was wearing a pair of grey sweats and had a fresh black tee and sweatpants ready for me too.

I took them with a slightly uncertain smile and dropped my towel to put them on. JJ didn't turn away from me, but I didn't do anything to hide my body and the way his gaze trailed over me had my stomach knotting. This was something I’d thought of and been afraid of and hungered for in a warring cycle ever since I was a kid and despite my insistence to myself that I wasn’t going to let any of these boys see me like this, I just didn’t care tonight. There was an innocence to this sin that made it feel too right to question.

"You're gonna make it fucking impossible to spoon you without me getting all excited over it," he commented as he bit his lip in a way that I'd only ever seen guys do on tv. It was way too sexy for any normal man to pull off, but Johnny James was no normal man.

“You mean like you did when we were hiding out at Sinners’ Playground before…” I trailed off because that had been right before he’d ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped on it for good measure. It was one of the last times that I’d truly believed I had everything in the world that I’d ever need because I had my boys, and nothing could ever change that or take it from me. But I’d been oh so fucking