Page 25 of Angel’s Doll

“You can sleep,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know.” My hand crosses the blanket and finds his forearm. His arm comes down from behind his head, slow, turning under my palm until his hand is open beneath mine. “That’s not why I asked you here.”

He turns his head on the pillow. Up close, the danger on him is a fact, like his height but then the surprise comes from his hands, how carefully they do small things.

“Still asking?”

Here is what costs. Not the wanting, the saying.

“Yes.”

He moves without hurry, and then his mouth is on mine.

The kiss is slow, slow enough to have parts. He kisses on purpose, one hand at my jaw, thumb on my cheekbone. When a sound I’ve never made comes out of me, he stops and waits. I press forward, and he takes that for the answer it is.

Heat rolls up from somewhere below my navel and settles, specific as a pin on a map.

I get my fingers into his collar. I touch his jaw where the stubble starts, the corner of his mouth where the split from the alley is still rough, and he lets me look.

His breath has an edge now, and the arm bracing him is doing slow, deliberate work at being gentle. Control costs him.

“Here?” His hand at my waist, over the shirt.

“Yes.”

“This okay?” Fingertips under the hem. Skin. One inch and no more.

“Yes.”

None of it sounds like doubt. Every question is a door, and every handle is on my side.

His hand travels up my ribs and my breathing forgets its training. Then his thumb crosses the band of my bra, and I do the thing that gives me away.

I go still. A cursor on an empty page, waiting for input I don’t have.

He stops. His hand simply rests where it is, and his mouth lifts from mine far enough to see my face.

“Sloane.”

Not Doll. My name, so I know which conversation we’re in.

“I’m not scared,” I say. True, but not enough. The lamp is right there and he can see everything, so I give him the rest before he has to ask for it. “There hasn’t been anyone. Ever. I don’t know where my hands go.”

I wait for the reaction. I’ve read enough books to know men keep a shelf of reactions to that sentence.

His face does none of them. He draws his hand out from under my shirt, smooths the hem flat like he’s closing a book he means to come back to, and settles onto his side, level with me.

“Tell me how,” he says.

“How what?”

“How does a woman like you make it to twenty-two alone?”

“Victor never locked me in,” I say. “There was no tower. I had a studio over the garage, my own door, my own stairs. But his cameras were on the driveway, his name on my phone plan, his card under every purchase, his driver whenever my car happened to be in the shop, which was whenever I had somewhere to be that he hadn’t approved. A date meant giving Victor a name, and a name was one more thing he could hold over me. I never let a boy walk me to my car twice.”

Angel doesn’t move.

“He never had to lock the door,” I say. “He owned every road away from it.”