Chapter 16 Clara
SIXTEEN
CLARA
Morning came in slow and hazy, seeping through the thin curtains in a pale wash of light that turned my ceiling into a watercolor.
For a few seconds I didn’t know why my chest felt tight or why my body already buzzed like I’d woken mid-fall.
Then my brain caught up.
Wes’s hand on my cheek. The rough drag of his thumb at my face. His breath, warm and close. The half inch between us that never quite disappeared, even after we did.
My eyes slammed shut again.
Oh god.
Heat rolled through me so fast it was almost dizzying. Every place he’d almost touched felt lit up in neon. My skin remembered the way his body had leaned in, how he’d braced one hand on the counter behind me and crowded my space like something in him had snapped.
We hadn’t actually kissed, but that didn’t seem to matter to the rest of me.
My nipples tightened under the thin cotton of my sleep shirt, pebbling hard enough that the fabric rasped when I shifted. My hand moved, palm flattening over my breast like I could smooth the feeling away. A sharp pulse of pleasure shot through me instead, low and insistent.
“Jesus,” I muttered into my pillow.
The sound came out more like a broken sigh than a prayer.
I tried to breathe past it and reroute my thoughts to literally anything else. Grocery lists. Shot lists. Bridal gowns. A million other lists that didn’t involve the way Wes Vaughn had looked at my mouth like he was starving.
My body wasn’t interested in grocery lists.
It replayed last night in jerky little flashes, like an old film stuttering on a projector.
His fingers brushing mine at the sink. The way his touch had branded the small of my back. The heat in his eyes when he’d murmured, I meant it, Duchess. His thumb on my cheekbone, careful and somehow reverent.
My thighs pressed together, chasing pressure. I curled onto my side, dragging a pillow between my knees, trying to ease the ache and only making it worse. A tiny, helpless sound slipped out of me before I could catch it, halfway between a moan and a curse.
I shoved my face deeper into the pillow to smother it.
This is ridiculous.
Wes Vaughn had nearly kissed me in his kitchen, with my brother’s name in both of our histories and an engagement ring still glittering on my finger.
I almost let him.
My hand slipped lower on autopilot, not quite touching anything I was willing to name, just skimming my ribs, gliding over my stomach, fingertips tucking into the waistband of my shorts before I yanked them back like the elastic had burned me.
“Absolutely not,” I whispered into the pillow, as if my body would listen if I made it a rule. “Nope. We are not . . . doing this.”
My pulse thudded between my legs anyway, steady and traitorous.
He was your brother’s best friend.
He almost kissed you.
You almost begged him to.
My mind tried to rebrand it as nothing. It was proximity, that was all.
Too much shared air, too much awkwardness, too much relief that he’d sat at the table instead of disappearing back into the couch.
Two lonely people in a quiet house with a decent meal between them and way too many unspoken things.
My body called bullshit.
It remembered the way his eyes had gone dark when he watched my mouth. The way his voice had dipped when he’d said, I don’t hate having you here. I just haven’t figured out what to do with you yet.
Heat surged again, hot enough that I kicked one leg out of the covers just to cool off, then immediately dragged it back under because the air felt too cold without something holding me together.
Embarrassment crawled up the back of my neck as the reality of it settled in.
I wanted him to kiss me.
Not in some vague, flattering way. Not in a wouldn’t-that-be-nice-if-I-lived-a-different-life way. In a very real, very here, very now kind of way.
He’s your brother’s best friend.
The thought snapped across my mind like a rubber band.
Hayes, with his protective big-brother glare and his tendency to treat me like a slightly defective egg. Hayes, who already carried more than his share of guilt when it came to Wes.
My stomach flipped.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, chest rising and falling too fast, the sheets twisted around my legs like I’d been wrestling myself all night.
“Get it together,” I told the cracks in the paint. “He didn’t even kiss you.”
The protest felt flimsy, even to me.
The not-kiss had felt like more than most actual kisses I’d had.
All that tension, all that almost, stretched tight and humming between us.
It had lived in the fraction of space separating his mouth from mine, in the way he’d apologized like it hurt to pull back.
In the way his name had left my lips without permission—Wes—as if my body already knew the shape of him in that context.
A tiny, stubborn thrill flickered to life under the embarrassment.
He wanted to kiss me.
It wasn’t just me inventing a moment and pinning it to the wall. He’d leaned in. He’d reached for me. His thumb had brushed my cheek like he’d needed to touch me more than he needed to do the smart thing.
My gaze slid sideways to the closed bedroom door, to the stretch of quiet hallway beyond it, and the memory of last night shifted in my mind, making room for something new.
The soft creak of floorboards. The low thud of weight moving around. The almost-impossible realization that Wes had climbed the stairs.
My heart tripped over itself as I pushed the covers back and swung my legs over the side of the bed, palms braced on the mattress while my head sorted through want and worry and whatever this new feeling was.
Somewhere in all that messy, charged space between what we’d nearly done and what we hadn’t, something had shifted.
I pressed my lips together, my pulse still a frantic flutter beneath my skin, and stood.
I walked to the door and cracked it open, cold air licking at my bare legs as I stepped into the hallway.
I just stood there, listening.
Wes’s bedroom door was open a few inches, just enough that I could see inside as I passed.
The bed was made, but not in that untouched, catalog way I’d first seen it.
The comforter had the faintest line down the middle where a body had been.
One pillow sat a little flatter than the other, like someone had slept there and then tried to smooth the evidence away.
Something in my chest pulled tight.
He’d come upstairs. He’d slept in his own bed. Not on the couch. Not in arm’s reach of the front door. Up here, where the man he used to be had lived.
I shouldn’t have felt proud. It wasn’t my victory. I hadn’t done anything but almost kiss him and then run away like a coward.
Still, a quiet, stupid swell of warmth rose under my ribs.
He was trying, not just surviving.
“Okay,” I whispered to no one, fingers brushing the doorframe as I moved past. “Progress.”
The smell of coffee drifted up from downstairs—a rich, dark promise that there was a world beyond my own spiraling thoughts. My stomach growled on cue.
I hesitated for half a second, then ducked back into my room instead of following it, shutting the door with a soft click. If I was going to face Wes Vaughn and the ghost of an almost-kiss, I could at least do it wearing a bra.
Leggings, thick socks, a soft sweater. I ran my fingers through my hair until it looked less like I’d been rolling around thinking about his mouth and more like a person who had it moderately together. A swipe of mascara. ChapStick. Nothing dramatic. Just a little light feminine armor.
Unfortunately, none of it did a thing to quiet the low hum under my skin.
When the scent of coffee finally proved stronger than my nerves, I wrapped my hand around the banister and headed downstairs, following it toward the kitchen—and whatever version of Wes Vaughn was waiting for me there.
Downstairs looked . . . different.
I hit the bottom step and blinked, trying to make sense of it. The living room usually greeted me like a cautionary tale—blanket heap, empty cups, a scatter of mail and wrappers.
This morning, it looked almost like a living space again.
The blanket was folded over the arm of the couch instead of lying in a defeated tangle.
The coffee table was mostly clear—no wrappers, no empty bottles, just a small stack of mail squared off and the remote lined up like it belonged there.
The dent in the cushion where Wes slept was still there, but it looked less like a crater and more like proof of use, not surrender.
Something in my chest loosened a fraction.
The smell of coffee pulled me toward the kitchen—rich and dark with a stripe of sweetness running through it.
Wes sat at the table with his forearms braced on either side of a small white plate. Two cinnamon rolls sat in the middle, steam feathering up from under a crooked drizzle of icing. A mug waited at the place across from him, already poured.
He looked up when I stepped into the doorway.
My brain didn’t supply words, just impressions.
His jaw was clean-shaven, the sharp line of it at odds with the softness around his eyes.
His hair was still mussed from sleep, sticking up a little like he’d towel dried it and given up halfway through.
The shadows under his eyes weren’t as deep.
He looked . . . rested. Less hollowed out.
My body responded before my thoughts caught up—heat sliding low in my belly, a quick, traitorous flutter as last night’s almost-kiss replayed in high definition.
His hand on my cheek. His breath. The space that hadn’t stayed space for very long.
“Hey,” he said, voice rough and low in a way that did not help. The corner of his mouth twitched, like his face hadn’t quite remembered how to commit to a smile but was considering it. “Coffee’s there. The cinnamon rolls might be questionable.”
My throat went tight. “You made these?”