Page 28 of Conceal

“Why don’t you?” I know I’m breaking the rules of the game, but I like Roman, and I want better for him. It never occurred to me that he could want something else, but of course he does. Why would a grown man want to babysit a dumb girl going to college? That’s not something a boy grows up wanting to be. Disposable.

“Your father saved my life. I owe him.”

My frown deepens. I’ve heard bits and pieces of his story, of course, but it can’t be that simple, can it?

Chapter nineteen

Mikhail

“Truth or dare,” Ro says, his dark gaze directed at me. I bristle at the challenge in his voice. I have a feeling I’m not going to like where this is going.

“Dare.”

Fuck truth, because then he’ll ask me about the tattoos, and that’s still not a conversation I’m ready to have just yet.

“I dare you to kiss Tati.”

I freeze.

Mother fucker.

I had a feeling he’d dare something like that, but I thought he’d give me a few stupid, easy ones first. I won’t kiss her without her permission.

“Or what?” I challenge, wanting to give Tati an out.

“Take your shirt off.”

Bastard.

Torn between two options, I’m trapped.

Tati laughs breezily, though, on top of me. “It’s just a kiss. We’ve done worse.” Except it’s not just a kiss.

She twists in my lap to face me more, and when her hand touches my cheek, my chest explodes. When her other hand wraps around to the back of my neck, my decade of discipline and self-control frays, and when her soft lips touch mine, it disintegrates. Years of watching from afar. Years of touching her without giving in to my desire. Years of loving her silently weigh on my control until it snaps.

With a sharp inhale, I can’t just kiss her back. I grip the back of her head with my hand and spin us until she’s pinned beneath me on the couch. I pierce the seam of her lips with my tongue and devour her - taste her the way I’ve been dreaming of this entire time. I can’t hold back. I won’t hold back. If this is the only kiss I get from her, I’m going to take it all - plunder every inch of her mouth. She tastes like her and sin. Her tongue is tentative against my own, like she’s afraid of what mine wants to do to her. I pin her to the couch with my chest, running my hand through her braid, fucking it all up the way she’s fucked with my head so much over the years.

Someone curses quietly beside us.

Years of pent-up longing and desire are unleashed in this kiss, and the force of it scares me.

I will myself to regain control. I slow my mouth. I slow the kiss, taking deep breaths in and out of my nose. My tongue caresses her as if to say goodbye, before I wrench my mouth off of hers and stare down at her. She’s always been beautiful, but my God, in the firelight? Lying beneath me, her golden hair that’s escaped her braid looking like a goddamn halo, her lips wet and plump and swollen from mine. I’ve never seen her more beautiful.

I should apologize.

But she’s blinking rapidly up at me, her chest heaving, as if she’s woken from a dream and really seeing me for the first time.

“Mik?” Her voice is small, and I’m torn between running away and burying my face between her tits, so I lean back up and run my hands through my hair.

She doesn’t let me get far, though; she grips my long-sleeve waffle shirt in her fists and pulls herself back, sitting on my lap. My hands fall to her hips the way they always do.

“What does it mean?” she whispers, and I can’t look her in the eye.

“For someone so smart, Princess...” Lev says tauntingly. I glare at him, or the general direction of him, even as my heart is trying to beat its way through my ribs.

This could be it. We’ve had so many ‘this could be it’ moments over the last several days that my nervous system is thrashed.

But she turns to look at Rowan, and again, it’s like she’s seeing him for the first time.