Page 44 of Halloween Town

She needed this, needed to fall apart like this. It had been so long since she’d felt this loved.

Poppy gasped as Thom slid a long finger into her folds, and she started to pant as he pleasured her, pulling out, sliding his finger over her clit and into her in a slow, steady, orgasm-building rhythm. Another finger joined the party, and soon she couldn’t hold back her moans and sighs. She hurtled up, reaching for that fireball of pleasure that she hadn’t experienced in far too long…

“You’re so hot, so close,” Thom growled in her ear. “So goddamn beautiful. I could come from just looking at you, hearing you.”

Thom curled his fingers inside her and flicked her clit with his thumb. Poppy shuddered in his arms and fell apart, riding his fingers to milk the last sensation. She spun away and tumbled through space and time, caught up in the colors.

As she floated down, her forehead on Thom’s shoulder, she realized it was her best orgasm ever…

And she’d had it in a darkened theater with a man she’d once called her best friend. With her friends and a bunch of strangers in the lobby next door.

Nothing about the last half hour had been sensible. And that, terrifyingly, was the problem.

Chapter Ten

Thom

Everyone in H-Town knew the shortcut to Solstice Deep: cutting across Blackweather Green. Since they were on foot—too many beers for him and glasses of wine for Poppy—they instinctively crossed Main Street to walk into the park. He’d navigated the path through the woods hundreds of times as a kid—in sunlight, shadow, and pitch-darkness—and a few times since he returned to H-Town.

“Are you okay to walk?” he asked Poppy as they picked up the path that would take them past the bandstand, across the meadow, and into the woods.

“Very,” Poppy replied.

It was late, but even so, the woods seemed a little darker tonight, heavier, denser. Stranger.

Strange and H-Town were always best friends, but Thom had to admit that since Poppy arrived, life was weirder still. He looked down at the outline of the sticker on his shirt and scraped at a hint of glue with his short thumbnail.

When the stickers were revealed earlier, his first reaction wasn’t embarrassment, but irritation. The whole idea of a single phrase, one chosen randomly from a sheet of paper, being able to define him was stupid and very reductive.

But a small, insistent part of his brain, the part obsessed with truth, suggested that it could, maybe, be quietly accurate. Not dramatically so. Not cruelly. Just … precise. And underneath his annoyance, he recognized a flicker, the tiniest hint of shame. Not because he was guarded—there was nothing wrong with keeping his thoughts and emotions buttoned down—but because someone had made him this way, because he’d cared enough, and caring had given his brother the ammunition to hurt him. Growing up, he’d had walls, but they were lower and more easily scaled. After Benji had screwed him over, and he’d learned how emotionally expensive trust could be, he’d rebuilt those walls and made them higher, more impenetrable, than before.

This damn sticker felt like a public reminder of a private—or at the time, a not-so-private—failure. Still, people who kept others at a distance didn’t open themselves up to being screwed, to disappointment; they didn’t get blindsided. Maybe, in a twisted way, the sticker could be seen as him being successful in his quest to keep himself emotionally isolated.

Why should he change? Distancing himself emotionally kept him standing when Benji crippled his career, poisoned his relationship with Ingrid, and dirtied his name. His shields and armor kept him upright when his world fell apart.

And was he thinking about the sticker because he was avoiding thinking about what had happened back there in the dark theater? Maybe. Probably. Yes. Thom looked around, taking in the dark trees, pulling in deep breaths of cold, sobering night air. He was acutely aware of the distance, mental and physical, between them again. He wanted to take her hand, but he had no excuse. Poppy knew this route as well as he did, and he didn’t need to put a hand on her back, she didn’t need to be steadied.

The silence between them wasn’t heavy, but it was there. Loaded with a hundred things neither wanted to say. He turned his head to look at her and immediately noticed her tense shoulders and that her steps seemed deliberately out of sync with his. She sensed him looking at her, turned her head, tipped her chin up, but her eyes didn’t move past his chin.

He recognized her retreat—he was a master of it himself. Despite what had happened in the theater, he wasn’t getting lucky tonight.

Oh, if he were a different type of guy—a bastard dick—he could pull her into his arms, kiss her senseless, and within half a minute, maybe less, have her panting and begging him to do her. That’s how strong their chemistry was; he knew he could talk or kiss her into sleeping with him.

But he didn’t want her like that. He didn’t want her to have any regrets in the morning, to second-guess this, to have doubts. He wasn’t a martyr or a hero, or someone who enjoyed punishing himself; he’d have her naked in two seconds flat if he was completely convinced that she wanted this as much as he did.

But he’d caught the embarrassment in Poppy’s eyes when they left the theater, the way she tucked her hands away so that she didn’t have to hold his. She’d liked what they did, of that much he was sure, but maybe she wasn’t sure if she was allowed to feel this way about him…

“You’re pretty quiet,” Poppy commented.

He looked down at her, her pretty face covered in shadows. “You, too,” he replied. He wanted to ask her about Benji, what she was thinking, feeling, and whether she was now regretting running away from her wedding. He wanted to know how she felt about her ex-fiancé and his ex-brother.

Oh, he knew she didn’t love Benji in the way a new bride should. But there were other kinds of love—and they didn’t necessarily have to be healthy. Maybe she still loved his brother because love could be stubborn and illogical. It could lodge itself under her skin and refuse to be reasoned with.

That might be why she’d avoided touching him after he’d brought her to a shuddering orgasm—suggesting that whatever was bubbling between them was nothing more than a rebound, a way to get back on her emotional and sexual feet.

Because if she still loved Benji—no matter how she loved him—then Thom wasn’t the man she was choosing. He was the man sharing her house, handy and accessible, someone she’d collided with. A diversion. A complication. A mistake.

And he refused—absolutely refused—to be anyone’s convenient distraction. Not even Poppy’s.