Page 62 of The Grumpy Defenseman

“I’m done hesitating,” I said.

My voice was steady. My hands were not, so I kept them at my sides where they could tremble privately.

“I’m done waiting for the timing to be right, because the timing is never going to be right. There will always be a contract, a trade, a Silas Vane with a reasonable objection, or a David Walsh with a cleaner, colder version of the same one.”

He watched me with an expression I had never seen on him. Not calculated. Open. The look of a man whose walls were standing but whose door was wide.

“I want you,” I said. “And I’m tired of acting like I don’t.”

The sentence stayed between us, alive with the electricity of a thing that had been true for weeks and was only now being said out loud.

He stayed still.

Did not breathe.

His eyes were dark in the low light, and what I saw in them was not hesitation. It was the last second before a decision that had already been made.

I reached up and touched his jaw.

Lightly. Deliberately. My fingers against the line of bone I had been photographing for six weeks, the jaw I had watched clench and tighten through a thousand frames, and under my hand it was rough with the day’s stubble and entirely human.

His breath came out in a sound that was not quite a word. His hand lifted toward my waist, then stopped before it touched me.

That stopped me too.

“I want you,” he said.

His voice was low. Wrecked. Honest in a way that cost him something before the sentence was even finished.

“I want you so much I have not known what to do with myself since the first day you walked in with that damn camera and told me to look at you like I wasn’t scared.”

My fingers stayed against his jaw.

“Then stop hesitating,” I whispered.

He closed his eyes once.

When he opened them, the heat was still there.

So was the restraint.

“I need to say this first.”

The office seemed to hold its breath.

I lowered my hand.

“Okay.”

He swallowed. His throat moved once. The towel was still in his hand, twisted between his fingers like it was the only thing keeping him grounded.

“I hurt you,” he said. “In front of the room. With something you gave me.”

The words hit clean.

Not easy.

Clean.