Page 88 of Lured By Shadows

The last thing I needed was to smell like a locker room or fish, but he didn’t make a face. His attention had already locked onto something else entirely.

His hands glided up my thighs slowly, his thumbs brushing the edges of my hot pants and nudging the fabric aside just enough to make my breath stutter.

I should’ve been yelling at him to back off, shoving him away with everything I had left, but instead my body lit up with a warm, slippery pull deep in my gut that spread right down between my thighs.

I was barely dressed. A cropped shirt clung to my sweat-slicked torso, exposing my stomach and the slight swell of my cleavage. My hot pants were practically glued to me, soaked through from the workout, hugging my ass and hips to the point of embarrassment. My ponytail slapped the mirror behind me while strands stuck to my neck, clinging to the sweat still rolling down my spine.

“Culver—” I breathed, the word breaking in the middle as the coolness of his fingers swept across my heated skin.

My back arched instinctively, pushing my chest harder into my shirt as my body decided to play for the other team, the traitorous one. His fingertips traced the bruises on my thighs. Dark, ugly marks Carter had left from gripping hard during sex. Each time his cold fingers brushed one, pain flared with heat, my stomach knotting as a heavy flush stained my cheeks.

I didn’t want Culver seeing those. But I also didn’t care. It was a conflicting feeling.

But instead of disgust, something far fiercer flickered across his face.

“You still haven’t answered me,” I whispered, my voice trembling around the edges as I tried to regain some sort of footing. “Why are you here?”

His hips rolled forward, pressing the thick length of his cock against my outer lips through our clothes. Every nerve below my waist lit up like I’d been zapped, my clit throbbing under the friction, heat darting through my core so fast I forgot to breathe.

He was pressed against me, reminding me in the most explicit way that whatever this was, it wasn’t friendship. If Culver had wanted to give off platonic energy, he’d chosen the worst possible method.

I forced myself to look up at him, to meet his eyes, to say something that might drag us both back into sanity, but he wasn’t looking at me. His focus locked instead on the bruises again.

The way his gaze lingered on every mark made it feel like he was taking them on as his own personal wounds, like they weren’t just stupid reminders of a hookup but something invasive that had no right touching what he saw as his. The intensity in his stare unnerved me enough to send an uneasy shiver racing down my spine, mixing fear with a pull I was starting to realize was excitement.

“Who did this?” he asked finally.

His voice was low and ragged, like he’d been grinding the words between his teeth. The question sounded like a threat wrapped in cotton. Soft in volume, heavy in implication.

His jaw twitched. His throat bobbed. I could see the restraint trembling beneath his skin.

“No one,” I blurted, too fast to sound believable. The lie tasted bitter and clumsy in my mouth. “It’s nothing.”

My fingers dug into his shirt as I pushed at him, trying to create space that didn’t exist, trying to redirect the moment before he completely unraveled.

His cock twitched against my thigh like it had a mind of its own, and my pussy responded with a sharp clench that made my breath catch. “More importantly, answer my question!”

He didn’t listen, or he didn’t care. His attention stayed locked on the bruises as if everything else in the world had been muted except those marks.

“I knew it,” he murmured, still not meeting my eyes. “I knew I should not have left you alone.”

“What’re you even talking about?” I snapped, my hands sliding down his torso to shove at him again, trying to wedge some reality between us. But Culver didn’t budge.

If anything, he pressed closer, the deliberate roll of his hips grinding his cock against my swollen clit through the thin barriers.

The friction made my head fall back against the mirror with a dull thud, a broken gasp tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop it. My thighs trembled around his waist, and for a moment, I had to squeeze my eyes shut just to keep from moaning.

“Culver, I dunno what you want,” I managed breathlessly, my voice splintering under the heat he was coaxing out of me, “but you’re seriously sending mixed signals.”

He stayed silent, still watching me with an intensity that made my skin feel too tight.

His hands squeezed my thighs suddenly, right over the bruises, and I sucked in a sharp breath as pain flared with a dark heat that shot straight to my core, twisting sharp and insistent in a way that blurred the line between hurt and hunger.

His palms glided upward over the slick heat of my thighs. His calluses dragged along my skin, leaving goosebumps in their wake before curling around my bare waist. His fingertips pressed into the soft skin above my hips, and when his thumb brushed the dip of my belly button, a shiver rolled through me so abruptly that my nipples tightened against my shirt, aching and embarrassingly obvious.

He finally looked up then.

His eyes were green and wild and endless, hunger simmering behind all that composure. The air between us felt charged, like a storm had built pressure inside a sealed room.