Trey opened his arms and caught her. She didn’t hit the floor. She hit his chest. Hard. Her shoulder bumped his throat and her flailing hand hit him square in the face. Her entire body melded along the length of his. And he was pressed right up against the delicious curve of her bottom.
“Trey!” She flailed out as she struggled to break free.
There was no way he was letting her go. Instead, he scooped her up into his arms and carried her the few feet to their final destination. She thrashed against him, protesting the entire way, calling him a pig and an asshole and telling him he was as ugly as the back end of a cow with the runs. That one was quite inventive, he had to admit. He mentally cataloged it away for future use.
He didn’t set her down until he threw open the first door on the right and plunged them both into darkness. He let her go then, when she had nowhere to go, since he carefully stepped in front of the metal door and flicked on the light- a bare bulb that plunged the small, dank space with the rows of vertical shelves stocked with cleaning supplies, the mop basin on the floor, and all the mops and wheeled buckets, back into shiny yellowed life.
Recognition lit up Ambi’s face in an instant. No, not recognition. Resignation. She’d known where they were the entire time and she hadn’t once cracked. There wasn’t even a hairline fracture in that mask of hers.
“Welcome back,” Trey purred.
Her eyes widened until they nearly popped from the sockets. Her nostrils flared like she could scent more than just the smell of cleaning chemicals and old mops.
“Welcome back to what?” she seethed, even though he knew full well that she knew. “This place looks like a dump. You stuffed me in some janitor’s closet. Congratulations.”
The light was there in her eyes and she couldn’t smother that the way she shut everything else down. She glanced around and he waited for that split second of fear that would tell him that he should let her out. That despite everything, she wasn’t lying and didn’t actually want him. He would never, ever force her to do anything that she wasn’t willing to do.
She didn’t rail at him and tell him to let her out. She didn’t tell him that she’d rather eat poop than get close to his dick ever again. She didn’t tell him that she hella-regretted those orgasms from the night before.
No. Instead she sucked her bow lip into her mouth and munched on it until he figured the tender skin cracked and flooded her mouth with the taste of copper. She finally released it then, red and swollen.
Trey realized then that he had a problem since he just about came in his pants just from watching her do that much. She was like a drug. Heady. Addicting. Something he couldn’t quit. Something he didn’t want to quit. She might be just as dangerous and toxic. He wasn’t quite sure if either of them were going to get out of whatever they were doing unscathed.
“Welcome back to the first place we ever made love.”
As Ambi’s eyes darkened and her lips thinned out, he wasn’t even sure he’d make it out of the janitor closet alive.
CHAPTER 14
Amberina
She knew. She knew about the hall. She hadn’t recognized the address, but she knew the place as soon as she got close. By the time she pulled up, she was a hot mess on the inside. She knew why Trey picked it. She knew why he’d brought her there. She knew exactly what his game plan was. Except her game plan was not to let him in. Not to show him that she cared. Not to give anything away. Her game was that her poker face needed to be kicked up into overdrive AfrickingSAP.
She’d almost made it out. Out into the fresh air and her car, where she could have yet another meltdown. Out where she could scream her lungs out right after dragging in gulps of air into her burning, painful lungs since she hadn’t taken a full breath the entire time in the hall. Out into the fresh, cold air that would clear her head of the memories shimmering and floating on the surface like oil on water.
She’d just about made it.
And then Trey, like he’d made a habit of doing, pulled her back.
Pulled her back and plunged her right back into a past she didn’t want to remember because it was shared with him. She wanted to keep moving forward. Without him. Without needing him or wanting him. Without the memories assaulting her.
He made that impossible.
He was blocking the door. They were in the same freaking closet they’d ducked into back in college when they’d gone to a friend’s wedding. The friend had been Trey’s. She barely knew Trey and didn’t know his friend, but he’d asked her to go and she’d agreed. The wedding was horribly boring. The hall was just as bland back then. The whole thing really was like a bad high school reunion. The fifty-year kind, not the fifteen or twenty. Everyone under the age of eighty had been bored out of their tree and the only reason everyone over eighty wasn’t bored was because they all left after the dinner to go to bed.