Page 114 of Never Alone
I sat up.
"You didn't."
"I did."
"Cole."
"I was curious. I hear the female experience is different. I wanted to know."
I was looking at him. He was looking at the ceiling, the corner of his mouth doing the thing it did when he was trying not to smile.
"You read a romance novel."
"One."
"FromQuinn."
"She has a lot of them."
"Cole Weston."
"Tessa."
"Did you enjoy it?"
He turned his head and looked at me.
"You or the book?"
I went to swat his shoulder.
He caught my wrist.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist, gentle, his thumb at the inside of it where the pulse was.
"You," he said. "I enjoyed you a lot more than the book."
He pulled me down.
He kissed me.
If someone had told my sixteen-year-old self that I would end up here someday—sleeping with Cole Weston, enjoying it, with a man who'd read a romance novel to learn how to be careful with me—she would have laughed in their face.
She'd have been wrong about all of it.
CHAPTER 22
Cole
I'd been sleeping in the pullout in the corner of the master bedroom for six weeks.
I hadn't slept in it in days.
The night after the bakery, I'd come into the bedroom, and Tessa had been in the bed, the sheets pulled back on the side I'd never been on, the lamp on her side off, and the lamp on mine still burning. I'd looked at the pullout in the corner. Then I'd looked at the bed.
I'd turned the lamp off and gotten in.
She'd reached for me before I'd fully settled. Without opening her eyes. She'd put her hand on my chest and curled into me the way you curl into a person you'd already decided was yours.
