Beg, Borrow, or Steal (When in Rome, #3)(63)

He smiles. “Give or take.”

The back of his knuckles finds my jaw to brush the softest touch across it. Longing coils around my spine and tenses my thighs. His palm settles on the juncture of my jaw and neck, right over my hammering, traitorous pulse. It speaks to him loud and clear.

“Why didn’t you say goodbye to me?” I didn’t realize that question was still hovering so close to the surface until I ask it.

His brows pull together behind his glasses. “When?”

“When you left Rome, to move with Zoe to Nebraska.”

“Did you want me to?”

I’m not quite ready to answer that honestly. “You said goodbye to everyone in the school but me. Everyone. I even came outside to see you off. Just in case. But you didn’t even look in your rearview mirror at me.”

I hate how vulnerable that makes me sound. It conjures a memory of me standing in the parking lot with my chin held high, completely unnoticed by Jack as he drives away.

He looks devastated. “I didn’t know you were out there. I would have stopped.”

“But you didn’t even come find me for one last fight.”

He nods. “That’s because I purposely avoided you.”

“Oh.” I want to scramble off his lap and find distance now, but Jack’s seatbelt arm won’t let me yet.

“Because that’s the exact moment I started to realize I was a shit human who had gotten myself into a big mess.”

“What—”

“Emily . . . I didn’t want to say goodbye to you because the prospect of my last encounter with you being one where you looked apathetic to my leaving—I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And that startled me more than anything.” He shakes his head. “I was marrying someone else and avoiding saying goodbye to you because it was going to hurt. The morality of that alone was bad. And I thought—I hoped that if I just moved to Nebraska and went about my life it would be okay. I’d forget about you.”

“But you didn’t?” I ask with two scoops of hope in my voice.

“No. It felt wrong being so far from you.” I know what he means. It’s a sensation I felt but wasn’t able to explain. A wrongness. The feeling of he was there, and I was here, and it wasn’t supposed to be that way, even if we were enemies. We were always supposed to be near each other.

Jack stares at me and I stare at him, and we’re lost in this vortex of what do we do now?

“Emily . . .” he whispers.

“Jack . . .” I respond, and twist around a little more to face him.

We hang like professional acrobats in this torture. There’s no escaping it tonight. I’m hiding in a closet with my (ex-)nemesis, and it’s time to face the facts: I want him, and he wants me.

His eyes are on my mouth, our pheromones are clogging up the air, and we only have seconds to hammer out the details. “I . . . I feel like we should think this through, but . . .”

I inch closer. “But it’s hard to think when you have a mouth and I have a mouth.”

“Exactly,” he breathes out, his thumb sweeping across the tender skin just outside the corner of my lips.

“Let’s think tomorrow.”

He shakes his head lightly, fingers sinking into my hairline. Quicksand is pulling us under. “You won’t avoid me?”

“I’m a grown woman, Jack. I know how to let whatever happens in a closet stay in a closet.”

His eyes wander all over my face and neck like he’s deciding where he wants to start. With his hand still on my jaw, he dips forward and presses his mouth to mine. It’s an immediate hit of heat. A head-to-toe sweep of pleasure. I suck in a breath through my nose and hook my arm around Jack’s neck.

He pulls away and then presses in again. It’s even better the second time. The kiss is deeper, our mouths open a little. It’s cute. Like saying into a mic, test, one, two, three. I really like his mouth. His lips are soft and full without being too much. At the first touch of our tongues, I feel his smile—his teeth against my lip—and it turns the Christmas lights on in my heart. Jack just tasted me, and . . . it made him happy. I make him happy.

But then Jack’s mouth slants over mine in a kiss that erases the word cute from the slate. It goes from soft and sweet to hungry and spicy. It comes with a challenging sweep of his tongue that I immediately match and then lob my own back with a nip of his lip. Jack groans and I put my hand flat to his solid chest to feel it. I’m chasing sensations and collecting them all in my pocket for later.

I can’t get close enough now, for me or for Jack. His hands go to my torso, where he’s nudging me to turn and face him. I shuffle around as quietly as possible and straddle his lap, knees on the ground. No sooner than I’m seated, he pulls me in tightly against him, wrapping his arms fully around me. I run my hands down the expanded muscles of his back as our mouths explore and claim and tease. Of course, I think like a lightbulb illuminating in my head. Of course it would be this way with him.

When Jack rolls his hips into me, and I feel just how much he wants me, a blowtorch singes a line down my spine. I am hot and needy in a way I’ve never experienced before.

His mouth leaves mine to graze his teeth down the column on my throat, and I let my head fall back to expose every inch for him—arching as his fingers take over where his mouth can’t reach. And as he traces over the subtle curve of my cleavage, any last kernels of my good judgment turn into crushed coals, sparking embers through my veins.