Page 67 of Velvet Vaughn

“And?”

“He looked at us for a solid ten seconds.” Leo deadpanned the last line. “Then he sighed, turned around, walked back inside . . . and locked the door.”

Anja lost it.

She buried her face in his chest and laughed, the sound rolling out of her, full and unguarded, nothing held back or managed, and it punched Leo under the ribs and stopped him cold.

Because he knew that laugh.

He’d heard it only once before, five months ago, at two in the morning, in her kitchen in the COBRA Securities complex. The apartment had laid in shadow, and he’d been standing at her counter drinking a glass of water with no clothes on and no idea what he was doing there or what came next. From the bed, she’d informed him that most people dressed before raiding someone else’s kitchen. He’d told her that pants would’ve made the whole thing feel unnecessarily formal. She’d emitted that same deep, throaty sound. It had been a door swinging open onto a room she didn’t let many people into.

Leo had carried the sound around for months without admitting it to himself. He’d catch himself hearing it at odd times—in line for a bagel, half-awake before an alarm—and shove it back down because the woman who made it had let him walk away without a goodbye, and he’d had to teach himself not to want things he couldn’t have.

And here it was again. Same laugh. Same woman. In a borrowed bed in a borrowed house. The universe was trying to come apart around them, and she was laughing at his sheep story as though it was the funniest thing she’d heard in years. Leo understood with sudden, uncomfortable clarity that walking away a second time was no longer something he’d be able to do.

“You’re staring,” she got out breathlessly.

Yeah, he was. He couldn’t help it. “That laugh.”

“You told me a story about a sheep. It was funny.”

“No.” He brushed her hair off her face, and his voice roughened. “I mean you really laughed. I’ve heard it once before . . . five months ago.”

The laugh faded, but the warmth behind it didn’t. They gazed at each other in the dark with everything between them finally out in the open where it couldn’t be filed away again.

“You remember that,” she murmured.

“I remember all of it.” He let the truth of it sit there, undefended. “I told myself I didn’t. I’m done lying.”

Anja didn’t answer with words. She reached up, dragged his mouth down to hers, and kissed him slowly. This time when the headboard found the wall, neither of them laughed.