CHAPTER 7 — THE KISS IN THE RESTRICTED HALLWAY #3
When my mouth found his, there wasn’t enough gentleness to call it a small mistake.
The kiss came with force, anger, and a hunger that seemed to span years without asking permission.
Noah let out a low sound against my mouth—not surprise, but impact—and kissed back the next instant, pulling my shirt with both hands and parting his lips under mine as if he’d also spent too long pretending he didn’t remember.
The shock of his taste hit me like a blow: mint, heat, anger, memory.
Noah was familiar and new at the same time, and that combination nearly knocked the ground out from under me.
I slid my right hand to his waist, pulling him against me without forcing the injured shoulder, but with enough urgency to feel his body press into mine.
Noah responded with the same contained violence—one hand rising to my nape, fingers sliding into my damp hair, the other fisted in the front of my shirt as if he needed to hold me there and accuse me at the same time.
The kiss didn’t erase the fight. It amplified it.
Every movement of his mouth felt like an answer to everything I’d said, every brief bite on my lip a reminder that he wasn’t some obedient victim of my desire.
The wall took his weight when I pressed forward, and Noah arched against me before remembering my shoulder existed.
I felt his pause—minimal—his body checking whether I’d felt pain, and that concern in the middle of the kiss left me more disarmed than any explicit surrender would have.
I gripped his hip harder, showing him I was there, that I wanted this, that the pain could wait while his mouth tore something open in mine.
Noah moaned low, and the sound traveled through my body in a way that made me forget everything—the corridor, the game, Elias, Hartwell—anything that wasn’t his skin under my hands.
“Damon,” he said against my mouth, not as a warning this time, but as if my name had been ripped from somewhere unguarded.
Hearing that almost broke me. My hand slid from his waist up the side of his body, feeling the heat through his shirt, his breath caught tight, the tension of muscles under my touch.
Noah turned his face to gasp for air, and I brought my mouth to the line of his jaw before reason could stop me.
He tilted his head, offering space for an instant, then gripped my jacket hard as if he hated his own body for allowing it.
His skin tasted of salt and cold, and my head went dangerously empty of anything but the need to find out where else he'd react like that.
“This doesn't change anything,” Noah said, but the words came out weak, lost between his ragged breathing and his hand still fisted in my hair.
“Then stop,” I replied, brushing my mouth close to his without kissing, letting the distance torture us for a moment. “Push me away, Bennett. Tell me you don't want this.”
His eyes opened, dark with desire and anger, and the hand that had been on my neck dropped to my chest. For a second, I thought he was going to push me away.
Instead, his fingers grabbed the fabric and pulled me back.
The second kiss was worse. Slower at first, deeper, harder to write off as impulse.
Noah kissed me like someone making a decision against his own better judgment, and I kissed back like someone who'd waited too long to keep pretending that body didn't haunt every memory I had.
Footsteps echoed from the side corridor.
Noah heard them before I did, maybe because some part of him still had enough sense to remember where we were.
He pushed against my chest, not brutally, but firmly enough to create distance.
I stepped back, breathing hard, my mouth hot, my shoulder protesting now that the adrenaline was starting to fade.
Noah stayed against the wall, his shirt wrinkled where my hands had been, his hair disheveled, his mouth too red for any professional explanation.
Looking at him like that gave me a satisfaction so intense it almost eclipsed the danger.
Two Hartwell assistants walked past the end of the corridor, talking, not seeing us clearly because of the curve and the stacked boxes.
The sound of their voices faded after a few seconds, but neither of us moved right away.
Noah was breathing like he'd just come off the ice, his eyes locked on mine with a mix of fury, desire, and something more fragile that he'd probably hate if I named it.
I should have said it was a mistake. Should have accused him, laughed, turned the kiss into ammunition before he could do the same.
I couldn't.
“Noah,” I began, and his name on my lips felt less like a weapon than a plea, which made me fall silent before I could continue.
He ran his thumb over his lower lip, as if feeling the mark of my mouth there, and that gesture almost pulled me back toward him.
When he spoke, his voice was low but not broken.
Noah Bennett, with his mouth marked by my kiss and his hand still trembling slightly where it gripped the bag strap, looked more dangerous than any rival I'd ever faced on the ice.
“You can pretend all you want, Damon,” he said, picking up the bag from the floor without fully breaking eye contact. “But your body just told the truth.”