Page 38 of Wild Obsession
My dreams were filled with falling stars, and I was falling with them.Falling endlessly through a sky of blue silk.
When I woke up, Chantel was still tucked into my side, her breath warm against my neck, her hair a dark mess across the pillow.
Light filtered through the blinds, and the clock told me it was a hell of a lot later than my usual, but I didn’t move.I couldn’t bring myself to disturb her.Instead, I kept my eyes closed and listened to her breathe.
I’d slept the whole night.Actually fucking slept.No tossing, no replaying every moment of yesterday on a loop, no waking up at three in the morning with all my life’s failures waiting to greet me.Just sleep.
Chantel had done that.
I turned and looked at her—the freckles across her nose, the slight frown she wore even in sleep, the pillow crease on the side of her face.There was nothing put-together about her right now.No silk dress, no perfectly pinned hair, no sharp comeback waiting on her tongue.Just a woman who’d shown up uninvited, slept in my T-shirt, and somehow made the worst day of my year feel survivable.
There was no guilt.No picking myself apart.No itch to get up and put distance between us before she could see me too clearly.Just a quiet I hadn’t felt in years.
Sean was a throwback.A version of me I used to be—loud, reckless, willing to set things on fire just to feel the heat.I’d needed that yesterday.But it wasn’t a place I could live.
Chantel was something else.Something more than I had any right to even hope for.
Her breathing changed before her eyes opened.A small inhale, a stretch of one hand against my ribs, and then her dark lashes lifted.
“Morning,” she murmured, her voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
She didn’t move out of my arms.Didn’t reach for her phone or sit up or do any of the things people do when they wake up in a stranger’s bed.She just blinked at me.“You stayed.”
“It’s my house,enchanté.”
A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.“Smartass.”
I shifted onto my side so I could face her properly, and she rolled with me, her hand sliding up my chest to rest at the base of my throat.The T-shirt I’d put on her had slipped off one shoulder in the night, and the patch of bare skin there was driving me to distraction.
I leaned in and kissed her.
She tasted like warmth and the faintest trace of last night’s beer, and the soft sound she made when my tongue found hers went straight through me.My hand found the bare curve of her hip under the shirt, my thumb stroking back and forth over her skin.She arched into the touch, a slow ripple of her body that was somehow more provocative than anything we’d done in Jamie’s kitchen.
“Dylan,” she breathed against my mouth.
“Mm-Hmm.”I kissed the corner of her jaw.The hollow under her ear.The pulse beating fast at the side of her throat.My hand wandered higher, up under the T-shirt, finding the curve of her breast.
She made another sound—softer, hungrier—and I almost lost the thread of what I was doing.Almost let myself slip into the version of this where I rolled her onto her back and took what she was clearly willing to give.
I pulled back enough to look at her.Her cheeks were flushed, her hair a wreck, her lips parted and waiting for more.She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever woken up next to.
“Stay there,” I murmured, brushing my thumb over her bottom lip.“Just like that.Let me look at you.”
She did.Of course she did.And the fact that she gave me that without question, without complaint, was its own kind of reward.
We lay there, tangled up, heat building between us, my fragile control the only fucking thing holding me back.
After a long stretch of silence, she let out a breath and turned her face into my hand.“I have to go,” she said, kissing my palm.
Something cracked under my ribs.“Now?”
“Soon.”She didn’t open her eyes.“I have to work tonight.It’s a long drive home.”
Home.
Just hearing her say it broke the stupid fucking fantasy my mind had been trying to build.The one where I woke up to her like this every day.Fuck, I was a fool.
