22. Haley
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Haley
His mouth was on my neck, trailing kisses down to my collarbone while his fingers worked the buttons of my shirt. One by one. Like he had all the time in the world.
“James.” His name came out breathless, barely a whisper.
“I’ve wanted this for so long.” He pushed the shirt off my shoulders and let it fall to the floor. His eyes raked over me. “You have no idea what you do to me, Hales.”
His hands cupped my breasts, thumbs brushing over my nipples until they peaked under his touch. I arched into him, desperate for more, and he smiled against my skin.
He pinched one nipple gently, then harder, and I gasped. “I want to taste every inch of you,” he murmured.
He lowered his head and took one nipple into his mouth, sucking and licking while his hand worked the other. The sensation shot straight between my legs, a pulse of heat that made me squirm beneath him.
“Please.” I didn’t know what I was asking for. More. Everything. Him.
“Please what?” He kissed his way across to the other breast, giving it the same attention.
“I want-” I couldn’t think. “I want your mouth on me.”
“Where?” He was moving lower now, kissing down my stomach, his hands sliding my underwear down my thighs. “Here?” He pressed a kiss to my hip bone. “Or here?” Another kiss, lower, right at the crease of my thigh.
“You know where.”
“Say it.” His breath was hot against my center, so close but not close enough. “I want to hear you say it.”
“I want your mouth on my pussy.” The words came out raw, desperate. “Please, James. I need-”
He licked me. One long, slow stroke from bottom to top, and I nearly came off the bed.
“Fuck, you taste good.” He spread me open with his fingers and licked again, circling my clit with his tongue.
I fisted my hands in his hair and pulled him closer, grinding against his face, chasing the release that was building low in my belly. He groaned against me, the vibration sending sparks through my entire body.
“That’s it, baby.” He slid two fingers inside me, curling them just right while his tongue kept working. “Let me feel you come. I want to feel you squeeze my fingers before I make you do it again on my cock.”
I shattered.
My eyes snapped open.
I was alone. In my bed. Drenched in sweat and breathing like I had just run a marathon, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.
A dream.
It was a fucking dream.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to get my body under control. My underwear was soaked. My nipples were hard against my thin sleep shirt. And my clit was throbbing like it had a personal vendetta against me.
Great. Just great. As if things weren’t complicated enough, now I was having wet dreams about James Sinclair while he slept on my couch twenty feet away.
I needed water. I needed cold water and maybe a cold shower and possibly a lobotomy to remove whatever part of my brain had decided that vivid sex dreams about my ex-brother-in-law were an appropriate response to emotional turmoil.
I swung my legs out of bed and padded down the hallway toward the kitchen, not bothering to put on pants or a bra because it was the middle of the night and I was in my own apartment and who was going to see me anyway.
But the universe had a funny sense of humor.
James was sitting at my kitchen table.
He was shirtless. Of course he was shirtless. His laptop was open in front of him, the screen casting blue light across his bare chest, highlighting every line of muscle I was absolutely not supposed to be noticing.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked, and he looked up at me.
His expression shifted. I watched it happen in real time, something flickering across his face that I couldn’t read. Was that disgust? Was he disgusted by me? By the thought of me stumbling out of my bedroom like some kind of feral gremlin?
Or was it the thought of what almost happened earlier? The thought of my mouth getting anywhere near his?
I couldn’t deal with this. The hot and cold. The mixed signals. One minute he was telling me he would always be where I was, the next he was looking at me like I was an inconvenience he couldn’t wait to escape.
I walked past him without another word and headed for the sink. Water. I just needed water. I could get water and go back to my room and pretend none of this was happening.
I turned on the tap.
Water sprayed directly into my face, my chest, everywhere, soaking me completely in about two seconds flat. I shrieked and grabbed for the faucet, trying to turn it off, but the handle just spun uselessly in my hand.
“Fuck!”
James was beside me instantly, reaching past me to try the tap, then crouching down to look under the sink. He dropped to his knees and found the shut-off valve, cranking it closed until the spray finally stopped.
We both stood up, dripping.
I looked down at myself and wanted to die.
The baby pink sleep shirt I was wearing had become completely transparent. Every curve, line, detail of my body was on display like I was competing in a wet t-shirt contest I had never signed up for.
My nipples were clearly visible, still hard from the dream, poking through the soaked fabric like they were trying to wave hello.
And I wasn’t wearing a bra.
Because I was an idiot who had decided that middle-of-the-night water runs didn’t require proper undergarments.
James was looking at the ceiling.
Not at me. Not at my body. At the ceiling. Like there was something incredibly fascinating about my light fixtures that required his complete and undivided attention.
He was being a gentleman. He was being respectful and decent and refusing to look at me while I stood there half-naked and completely humiliated.
And for some reason, that made me furious.
I was so angry I could barely see straight. And underneath the anger, something else.
Something hotter that had been building since that dream, since his arms around me earlier, since the moment he walked back into my life and reminded me what it felt like to be wanted.
I was horny. I was so fucking horny I wanted to scream.
It had been too long. Way too long since anyone had touched me who wasn’t myself. My hand and the occasional vibrator had been my only companions for years now, and they were fine, they got the job done, but they weren’t this.
They weren’t James standing in my kitchen refusing to look at me like I was made of something breakable.
“Why won’t you look at me?”
The words came out sharp. Demanding.
James’s jaw tightened, but his eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling. “What are you talking about?”
“Even now you’re avoiding me.” I took a step toward him, water dripping from my hair onto the floor. “Look at me, James. Am I that bad? Is it that I’m so unattractive that you can’t even spare a glance at me?”
“Haley, that’s not-”
“Then what is it?” I stepped closer again, getting in his space, forcing him to acknowledge me. “You held me earlier. You told me you’d always be where I am. And now you can’t even look at my face because you might accidentally see my body?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me!” My voice was rising, frustration bleeding through every word. “Because I’m standing here feeling like the ugliest woman on the planet, and you’re staring at my ceiling like it holds the secrets of the universe.”
“You want to know why I won’t look at you?” His voice was strained now, rough around the edges. “You really want to know?”
“Yes! I really want to-”
He moved so fast I didn’t see it coming.
One second I was standing there yelling at him, and the next I was pinned against the counter, his body pressed against mine, his hands gripping the edge on either side of my hips. His face was inches from mine, eyes blazing with an intensity that stole the breath from my lungs.
And his cock was hard against my thigh.
“I know you can feel that.” His voice was low. “So tell me, Haley. Do you really think I’m not attracted to you?”
I couldn’t speak. He was everywhere, surrounding me, overwhelming every sense I had.
“Then why are you pushing me away?” The words came out shaky, nothing like the anger from moments before.
“Because it’s too damn hard not to.” He dropped his forehead against mine, his breath ragged. “God, Haley. The things you do to me. The things I want to do to you.” He let out a sound that was half laugh, half groan. “Fuck.”
He looked helpless. Lost. Like he was fighting a battle he had already lost and was just now realizing it.
I put my hand on his chest. Felt his heart pounding under my palm, just as fast and frantic as my own.
“For once, take what you want.” I held his gaze, refusing to look away. “Stop thinking so much.”
He sighed, and I felt it move through his whole body. His hands came up to cup my face, cradling it like I was precious, like I was breakable in a completely different way than before.
“What if you don’t want what I want?”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Tell me not to, Hales.” His thumbs traced my cheekbones, his eyes searching mine. “I’m hanging on by a thread here.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Fuck.” He said it like a prayer.
And then he kissed me.
His mouth came down on mine and the world caught fire.
This wasn’t gentle. He kissed me like he was starving for it.
I grabbed his shoulders and pulled him closer. He groaned into my mouth, the sound vibrating through my entire body, and then his teeth caught my lower lip, nipping hard enough to make me gasp.
“Been wanting to do that for so fucking long.” He kissed along my jaw, down my neck, his words hot against my skin. “You have no idea. No idea how many times I’ve thought about this.”
“Show me.” I tilted my head back, giving him access. “Show me what you’ve thought about.”
He made a sound low in his throat and bit down on the curve of my neck, then soothed it with his tongue. I moaned, loud and shameless, and felt him smile against my skin.
“That sound.” He kissed back up to my mouth. “Want to hear you make that sound when I’m inside you. Want to hear you scream my name while I-”
My eyes snapped open.
He pulled back, confused, his lips swollen and his chest heaving.
“What?” He searched my face. “Where did you go?”
“We kissed.”
“Yeah.” He let out a breathless laugh. “We did.”
“No.” I shook my head, trying to organize my thoughts through the haze of arousal. “Not now. Before. In the hospital.”
James went white.
The color drained from his face so fast I thought he might actually pass out. He took a step back, then another, putting distance between us that felt like miles.
“I thought you-” He stopped. Swallowed. “You remembered.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
Shit. I had actually forgotten it. Or not remembered. None of this made sense. I’d kissed James right after Lily was born, and conveniently my hormonal brain had forgotten about it.
“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to.” His voice was rough, barely above a whisper. “You never mentioned it. I thought maybe you’d forgotten, or-”
“Why would I do that, James?”
“Lily was your priority. As she should have been.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking anywhere but at me.
“It was too much at the time, Haley. You had just given birth. You were starting a new life. And I just thought maybe you chose not to think about it. Chose to pretend it never happened because dealing with it was more than you could handle.”
I thought about the last three years. The distance between us. The careful, polite texts. The way he had helped me from afar, never pushing, never asking for more.
What would it have been like if he had told me?
If we had talked about it instead of burying it under layers of silence and denial?
Would we have been together this whole time?
“I didn’t want to burden you with anything,” he continued, his back against the opposite counter now, as far from me as he could get without leaving the room.
“You had enough to deal with. A new baby, no support from Caleb, my mother threatening you at every turn. The last thing you needed was me complicating things by confessing that I’d been in love with you since before you even married my brother. ”
The words hit me like a physical blow.
In love with me. Since before I married Caleb.
I walked toward him. Watching his face as I closed the distance between us, watching him press back against the counter like he was bracing for impact.
I stopped right in front of him. Put my hands on his chest. Felt his heart hammering under my palms.
Then I kissed him.
Softer this time. Gentler. Trying to pour everything I couldn’t say into the press of my lips against his.
When I pulled back, his eyes were wet.
“You’re never a burden to me.”