Didn’t want to stop.
Ever.
“I’m...” Gasping, Rafe didn’t finish his sentence.
She put a shaking finger to his lips. “Don’t apologize,” she whispered. Begged, more like it.
Yeah, she was “only the help,” but she needed to be good enough to be worthy of his kiss. Like any other woman he’d known.
“I wasn’t going to apologize,” he told her, one hand against the door just above her head. He leaned over her, still breathing hard. “I was going to tell you that I’m in over my head.”
His blue eyes were shadowed with passion, but surprisingly clear, too. Honest.
She had to be the woman she was, she reminded herself, not even sure in the moment what those words meant.
“We’re both adults.” She tried to swallow, to ease the dryness in her throat. Pretty much whispered, “We don’t have to make this more difficult than it is.”
His gaze intensified. She could feel her chin starting to tremble as she stared up at him. “We just have unfinished business.” She said what she needed to
believe was true. “Something that just needs finishing.” Just. Just. Just.
“Just” put limitations on it.
She was sure it did. That she was facing reality. Had her eyes wide-open.
“I’ve had the hots for you since I was twelve,” she told him, hiding under her detective guise, the cover that slid down over her emotions when she was dealing with a potentially heartbreaking case. Like many first responders, she knew how to find her calm. Her strength. Knew how to brace against pain that was too unimaginable to bear. “It’s natural for someone to be left in this state after feeling what we felt at such an impressionable age, and having had it ripped away as we did, without allowing it to run its course and fade naturally.” She’d been working on the situation, the feelings for Rafe that just wouldn’t fade, for years.
“It’s also natural to romanticize something we lost. To grieve for it.” Counseling she’d sought after a reckless stint of meaningless lovers in college had taught her that. “Which then tends to strengthen those remembered feelings. Make them more than they are.”
If she just kept talking, his hard-on might fade. Maybe they could still defuse this enough to get him out the door and her into a cold shower.
“You’re proposing that we have sex and get it out of our systems?”
Of course she wasn’t. Was she? There was merit in the theory...
“You have a better plan?” she asked him. “We live too close to think that, now that the smoldering spark has been lit, we won’t both be burned by it if we don’t put it out.”
“And you think a one-night fling will do that.”
She had no idea what she thought. She only knew that there was no hope of a future for them. Not just because of his choices, but because she wasn’t ever going to be able to trust him not to turn his back on her, to ditch her, to stab her back if one of the Coltons insisted he do so. Maybe he’d stand up to Payne this time. Maybe not.
But the heart didn’t forget when someone chose one person over another. Not when the one not chosen was so irreparably damaged by that choice.
“I think it’s our only hope at this point.” The truth came to her. Loud and clear. She had to get this man out of her system or spend the rest of her life grieving for him.
She needed a strong dose of the real Rafe Colton to replace the romanticized version of the man her fantasies had created within her.
The strength of his desire, pressing against her, grew stronger. More insistent.
“But it would just have to be the one night, Rafe. Whether it gets rid of the attraction or not. I’m not that young girl anymore. I don’t even want to be. And I won’t be in a relationship that can’t lead to marriage.”
He blinked, his lids staying closed a second or two too long, and then he nodded. “I wish it could be different.”
She didn’t. Not anymore.
But she pulled his lips down to hers with a hunger that was never going to be satisfied.
Not in one night.