With Every Heartbeat (Forbidden Men 4)

I gulped and lifted my gaze. He stepped in toward me, and I backed up a pace. As if my retreat irritated him, he turned me and pressed my back to the wall.

“Quinn?” I said, my voice small. My skin buzzed with apprehension. His expression looked so severe. I had no idea what he was thinking, and that scared me. I wasn’t afraid of him exactly, but I was definitely afraid of the moment. Anything could happen, but what I feared most was what I’d let happen.

A relieved breath rushed from me when he released my arm. But the small moment of freedom didn’t last. He slid the back of his finger up my bicep toward my shoulder, making me suck in a shaky inhale.

“It’s funny what you remember when you’re drunk, you know.” His gaze seemed fixated on the place he touched me. “Like I was just sitting here, remembering the last time I drank. Do you remember that night, Zoey? Do you remember what we almost did?”

He cupped my cheek with one palm while he pressed his other hand against the wall beside my face, so close that his wrist brushed my hair. I gulped and tried to soak deeper into the sheetrock. But he was still right there, invading all my senses.

“Do you?” he pressed.

I closed my eyes. “Yes,” I whispered, because in that moment I didn’t know how to lie to him.

He let out a harsh breath. “Why didn’t I remember that until now? I almost had my mouth on you but I stopped because I wanted to be faithful to my girlfriend. What a

joke. Faithful? She doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.”

“Quinn,” I started, but he took his other hand off my cheek to set it on the wall too, neatly trapping me into place.

“Do you think I’m a joke, Zoey?”

“What?” Flabbergasted by the question, I shook my head. “No. Never.”

His gaze met mine. “Does she? Does Cora? She’s probably laughing at me, right now. Isn’t she?”

Again, I swished my head back and forth. “N-no. The last time I saw her, she was crying.”

Mouth curling into a hard smile, he let go of me and stepped back. “Good.” But as soon as the word left his lips, he shuddered and his eyes filled with pain and remorse. “What is wrong with me?” Cupping his head, he backed away some more until the backs of his legs hit the couch, and then he slumped down, sitting on the cushions and still cradling his head in his hands. “I’m glad she’s crying? How wrong is that? Hours ago—just hours ago—I thought she was the love of my life, and bam.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that, I hate her? That doesn’t even seem possible. But it is. I mean, seriously, I want nothing to do with her. I don’t want to see her, I don’t want to talk to her, I don’t even want to think about her. She’s dead to me. How can I be that coldhearted after I was this close to asking her to...?”

He shuddered again and bowed his face, looking more tormented than I could handle. Unable to stay away, I peeled myself from the wall where I’d still been hovering and went to him.

“You’re not coldhearted.” I set my hand on his shoulder. “You’re just...brokenhearted.”

When he leaned into me, I shifted my fingers from his shoulder to his hair, and he wrapped his arms around my waist. So I wrapped mine around his head. His large frame quivered again.

“Oh, Quinn.” I wanted to help him, anything to end his pain. So when he tugged me down onto his lap, I went willingly; I even kissed his hair.

His arms banded even tighter around me as he said, “Thank you,” in such a broken voice that I had to bite my lip to keep any more tears from spilling. “Thank you for coming.”

He pressed his lips to the side of my head, just above my ear, and I rested my cheek on his shoulder. We sat there for I don’t know how long, but it was long enough for me to grow warm and realize how hard yet completely comfortable he felt under me.

And speaking of hard—and under me—something had grown noticeably stiffer against my bottom. Realizing how inappropriately I was sitting on his lap, I started to move off him, but his hand snaked out and caught me high on the thigh.

“Don’t go.”

I fell still. Unable to help myself, I kissed his temple. “How can I help you? Tell me what to do.”

He drew in a breath, smelling my neck and brushing his nose lightly along my pulse. Then his hand moved slowly up my thigh until he was gripping my hip. I grew moist and tensed, hoping he didn’t find out.

“Make it go away,” he whispered against my throat. “Make me forget.”

With a shiver, I shook my head, not understanding, or maybe I was too hopeful to really think I understood. “How?”

I’m pretty sure it wasn’t his nose that touched me next, right under my ear. It felt too wet and soft, like tongue, followed by the crisp nip of teeth. I gasped, and my head fell back as my fingers bit into his shoulders, unable to control the crackling surge of heat between my legs.

As his thumb stroked my hip, burning through my clothes, scorching my skin, and shifting dangerously too close to where I was throbbing and wet, he pulled back to look me in the eye. “I almost had my mouth on you that night,” he slurred. His gaze fell to my lips. “Except I wasn’t free. And now that I am...I still want to kiss you. I’ve wanted to kiss you so many times. So many nights. I’d dream about you and wake up aching. Then I’d touch myself, wishing it was your hand, not my own. I’d walk through the library almost every day, just to see if you were there.”

I drew in a sharp breath, unable to believe what I was hearing. After weeks of crushing on him, wishing I was his, and knowing I could never be, weeks of knowing he loved someone else, after helping him pick out a ring for her, it didn’t seem real that I was hearing what I was hearing.