Page 25 of True Ruin

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant more than the way she’d treated him in school. More than the ways people learned to survive and called it growing up. She wanted to tell him the kiss they’d shared on those bleachers had been the second best of her life, the first being the night in the music room. She wanted to tell him that she got no pleasure from making anyone feel small, and she never had.

“Gabi,” he whispered and reached for her without taking his eyes off her, knocking the spoon sideways and sending a streak of hot fudge across the front of his shirt and along the side of his neck. He pushed back from the island, a laugh breaking loose. “That was a dignified attempt at seduction.”

“It was.” Gabi pressed her lips together because laughing along with him felt ruthless in at least three different ways.

“Jesus, it’s sticky,” he said, swiping at the stain with a napkin, which only made things worse. It stuck to the cotton like it had found religion. “That’s what I get for making the real-dealchocolate instead of buying a bottle of the cheap stuff. That can’t be this thick.”

Unthinkingly, he caught the back of his collar and tugged his shirt over his head with the distracted impatience of a man solving a minor problem, not ruining her entire ability to think. It landed somewhere near the sink.

Leaving Dallas standing there in low-hung jeans and nothing else, dark hair mussed, glasses slightly crooked, one fist braced on the island, his laugh fading when he caught her hungrily staring at him like she’d been tragically deprived of a bare chest for two years.

Of course, Gabi had imagined what his body looked like—at least three times this week after dropping Sam at school. (Her vibrator had been involved.)

But imagination had been a poor, underfunded thing.

Dallas’s body was lean and hard, with scars she didn’t know the stories for and ink she wanted to trace with her tongue. The compass rose curved around his forearm. Another tattoo, a fragment of script, sat just above the waistband of his jeans, the last few letters disappearing right where his hip bone jutted sharp above the worn denim. He had a dusting of hair between his pecs, just the right amount, not too much, not too little, racing in a straight line to his groin.

He was beautiful in a way that made her wish she had his brother’s skill, because she suddenly understood the urge to put a man on canvas.

“Don’t make me apologize,” she whispered, stunned she’d said it out loud.

His fist uncurled, fingers flexing. “Who made you apologize?”

Theo. Not in words she could point to. But he’d taught her to suppress what she wanted, to make herself less in bed. Quieter. Easier. Sex had become his game, his pleasure, his rules, and she’d learned them too well.

Dallas cornered her openly this time, backing her into the island, his heated gaze roaming her face. “Don’t bring him here, because the starved look in your eyes, Sparkle, is burning me up. And I want itall.”

“Tell me,” she whispered, her heartbeat everywhere.

“I’m a writer.” His mouth came close enough to feel the words, his breath a sizzling streak past her cheek. “I’ll do it that way. For now, I’llshowyou.”

His hand slid into her hair. The other caught her waist, pulling her against him, and Gabi went because there was nowhere else she wanted to be. Then he seized her lips like he’d been holding himself back all night and had finally run out of places to put his need.

She found his bare chest and the wild, impossible thud of his heart under her palm. He made a rough sound into her mouth when she tugged his bottom lip between her teeth, and whatever remained of apology, caution, shame, those careful rules of a previous life, cracked right down the middle.

Gabi opened for him, and Dallas kissed her as if he’d been waiting years to do it right.

EIGHT

Linger–The Cranberries

The way Gabi Wilderconsumed him should have tripped whatever alarms Dallas had left.

She turned a tender kiss into a violent one. Sucking on his lip, his tongue, whispering every dirty thing she’d been fantasizing about for the past week into the curve of his neck, then polishing that off with a teasing bite that had his cock hardening to a pain-pleasure degree behind denim.

Astonishingly, she’d been thinking about this as much as he had.

Fucking.Him.

In the shower. On the bench of the gazebo she’d seen out back. In her space in the mill before she moved in, the smell of raw wood clinging to their skin. In her truck. On his desk in theDispatchoffice, shoving papers to the floor to get to each other.

And she liked his glasses. Enough to request they stayon.

This handy tidbit she murmured right before taking them off anyway and sweeping him back into the kiss of a lifetime. Heconsidered stopping her long enough to make sure she knew what she was starting. But whenever he tried, she switched things up in some absurdly sexy way. Spinning them and backing him into the island, drawing her leg high on his hip—an easy move in a dress—her nails scoring his scalp just enough to hurt.

She talked a lot, too, when he mostly kept things in his head.

I love kissing you.