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Chapter Eight

Bitter

I wake up with Sweet’s hand over mine and panic sitting on my chest like a corpse that forgot to stay buried.

She is asleep in front of me, curled on her side in my bed, her back tucked against my body like she has every right to fit there. One of my arms is around her waist, my hand low on her belly beneath hers. Her hair is spread across my pillow, still smelling faintly like my shampoo and her own sunshine nonsense, and one bare leg is tangled with mine beneath the blanket.

The apartment is quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator, the distant rumble of festival traffic outside, and Sweet’s soft breathing.

I should move. I should get out of bed, check cameras, make coffee, do something useful that does not involve lying behind a woman and pretending the shape of her against me ain’t doing something strange to my ribs.

Instead, I stay there like a dumbass.

Last night sits all over my skin. Her mouth. Her hands. The faint sting of her nails across one shoulder. Her voice telling me this did not feel like just sex. Her eyes when she made damn sure I understood that before she let me take her to bed.

More than any of that, I remember her looking straight at me and saying the thing that has been fucking with my head ever since.

I trust you.

That should feel good.

It feels like standing too close to an open grave.

I don’t sleep with women wrapped around me. I don’t wake up slow with my nose in their hair and my hand under theirs. I don’t learn how a woman breathes when she is deep asleep. I sure as hell don’t lie awake half the night listening to her and feel relieved every time she shifts closer.

Except I did.

Sweet moves, making a soft little sound as she presses back against me. My body wakes up fully and stupidly.

So does every fear I own.

I ease my hand from beneath hers without waking her and slide out of bed. Cool morning air hits my skin, and I feel like I crawled from something warm and alive into a room built for the dead.

Which is dramatic as hell, but I come from dramatic people. My grandmothers once held a séance for a missing set of truck keys and blamed the ghost of my great-uncle before finding them in the freezer.

Adams blood does strange things under pressure.

I pull on my jeans and look back at the bed.

Sweet rolls onto her stomach, one arm tucked beneath my pillow, face turned toward me. Morning light spills across her cheek. Her mouth is swollen from mine. There is a little mark low on her throat that I left there even though I knew better.

Something fierce and satisfied moves through me.

Mine.

The word hits hard enough to make me step back.

No.

Sweet ain’t mine. She belongs to herself.

That was half the damn point yesterday. I told CSI nobody used her phone without asking. Nobody put that tracker back on her car. Nobody decided what risks she took because we thought we had better reasons than Razor.

She noticed, and that might be the worst part.

She noticed every time I stopped myself from taking over, every time I asked instead of grabbing, every time I gave her room instead of closing it. Then last night she told me exactly why she trusted me enough to let me get rough with her.

You keep giving the choice back.