Page 7 of The Biker and the Curvy Widow

"You want to know why I'm here now?" He meets my eyes, and the intensity in his gaze pins me in place. "Because you said you're leaving. And I realized that staying away didn't protect either of us. It just meant I'd lose you without ever⁠—"

He stops. Looks away.

"Without ever what?"

Silence. The kind that says more than words ever could.

I should let it go. Should accept the half-truth and move on, pretend I don't feel the electricity crackling between us, don't notice the way his eyes keep dropping to my mouth.

But I'm tired of pretending.

"If you're going to watch me leave," I say quietly, "at least give me something real to take with me."

His head snaps back toward me. "Mara⁠—"

"I mean it." I move around the bar, closing the distance between us until I'm standing right in front of him, close enough to touch. "I've spent two years wondering what I did wrong. Why you couldn't stand to look at me. If there was something⁠—"

"There was nothing wrong with you." His voice is raw. "There's never been anything wrong with you."

"Then why⁠—"

He kisses me.

Or maybe I kiss him. Maybe we meet somewhere in the middle, two people who've been circling this moment for longer than either of us wants to admit. All I know is that one second we're talking, and the next his mouth is on mine, and everything else disappears.

It's not gentle. It's not sweet. It's two years of tension igniting all at once, his hands fisting in my hair, my back hitting the bar as he crowds into me. He kisses me like he's starving, like I'm the only thing that can save him, and I kiss him back just as desperately because I've wanted this—him—for so long that I'd convinced myself I'd imagined the wanting.

I didn't imagine it. This is real. His hands on my hips, his tongue sliding against mine, the groan that rumbles through his chest when I arch into him. Real and overwhelming and everything I shouldn't want but do.

Then he tears himself away.

"This was a mistake." He's breathing hard, his lips swollen, his eyes wild. "I can't—Mara, I'm sorry."

Before I can respond, he's gone. The door swings shut behind him, and I'm left standing alone in my dead husband's restaurant, lips still tingling, heart still racing, more confused than I've ever been in my life.

He kissed me like I was air and he was drowning.

Then he walked away like I was the thing killing him.

And I still don't know which one of us is more broken.

CHAPTER 3

POPE

Ican still taste her.

And I hate myself for wanting more.

The whiskey burns going down, but it doesn't burn away her. Nothing does. I've been pacing my office at the clubhouse since three AM, trying to convince myself that walking away was the right thing. The noble thing. The only thing a man with any decency would do.

I kissed my dead best friend's wife. Worse—I don't regret it. I want to do it again. I want to do a hell of a lot more than kiss her.

The guilt should be crushing me. It is crushing me. But underneath it is something worse: hunger. The kind I've been starving for two years. The kind I've been denying for seven.

I pour another drink and don't taste it.

Marco's face swims up from the amber liquid. Grinning, always grinning. The way he looked that last night, before everything went to hell.