Page 114 of Gamebreaker

"We have to stop. This can't..."

She kissed me very tenderly. Not at all like the woman who'd bent me over this bed and made me count.

"Not yet," she said. "Let's have tonight. We'll worry about tomorrow when it comes."

"You keep saying that."

"Because I mean it." She tucked me back under her chin and wrapped herself around me. "Sleep. I've got you."

I lay there in the circle of her arms, sore and marked and completely emptied out, and I let myself pretend tomorrow would never come.

But it would.

It always did.

And when it did, we'd both have to face what we'd done. What we'd started. What we both knew couldn't go on, and neither of us seemed able to stop.

I was in so much trouble.

We both were.

But for tonight, for whatever hours we had left before the sun came up and the real world clocked back in, I didn't care. I'd told her I trusted her. I'd meant it. And for a few hours, at least, she'd held that like it was the most fragile, important gift anyone had ever handed her.

For tonight, I wanted to stay right here in Cam's arms and pretend this could be enough.

Even though I already knew it wouldn't be.

14

Don't Text Her

Cam

The sky was just starting to lighten, that purple-gray stretch before dawn when the city was still asleep but the night was already losing its grip. I'd been awake for the last hour, watching Harper sleep, knowing that when the sun came up fully, this would be over.

We'd agreed on one night.

One night was almost gone.

She slept the way she did all of it, with her whole body. She’d complained about the lack of a bonnet, and then promptly sprawled across more than her half of the bed, one leg hooking over mine, her curls everywhere, her mouth slightly open. Every so often, she made a quiet, annoyed sound, like she was arguing with someone in her dream and winning.

I knew every mark I'd left on her. I'd counted them in the gray light while she slept, because I could, and because I needed to know exactly what I'd done. The bite under her ear. The one where her neck met her shoulder, deep enough that I could see the shape of my teeth. Two on her collarbone. A bruise darkening on the side of her throat, right over the pulse I'd held in my palm. Faint dark lines on her wrists from my belt, almost gone now.

Every one of them had been asked for, consented to. Every one of them made a hot, possessive heat coil low in my belly.

And in a few hours, she'd walk out into the world wearing them, and nobody would ever know they were mine. That she was mine.

Because she wasn’t.

Harper stirred. Her hand slid across my stomach in her sleep, and I caught it before I could stop myself, lacing our fingers together. I felt the rightness of it settle into my chest like it had always belonged there.

Her eyes opened slowly, heavy with sleep. For a moment, she just looked at me, and I watched her remember where she was, who she was with, what we'd done. Her mouth curved. Then her gaze dropped to our joined hands, and the curve faded, and I saw the hunger come in underneath it. The same desperate need I'd been fighting all night.

"What time is it?" she murmured.

"Almost dawn. Five-thirty."

"We should sleep." But she didn't close her eyes, and she didn't let go of my hand.