His chest should have loosened with that confession, right? But it only grew oddly taut, like he’d swallowed a chicken bone. Melody seemed to sense the gravity of what he was saying, because she didn’t seem to be breathing. “How?”
“Mel.”
“How?”
He was already shaking his head. “Let’s get some sleep, all right?” Forcing a smile, he checked the time on the stove. “We only have six hours before that camera is back in our faces. And it sounds like we’re going to need some rest before we face Trina.”
“There isn’t enough rest in the world,” she said, absently, still scrutinizing his face. And he wanted to lay her down somewhere, press their heads together, and let her look, because no one would ever see him more accurately in his life. But that would invite more between them. More than he could afford or offer.
“Night, Mel.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she slid off the stool and crossed the living room, looking back at him once before disappearing into her bedroom. Her glass of scotch sat unfinished in front of him, but he could see the faint outline of her lips where she’d sipped. Without thinking, he picked up the glass and closed his mouth around the exact spot hers had been, gulping the clear liquid greedily, feeling a corresponding tug in his groin. He let the need bleed in . . .
And knew he was only about to make it worse.
Chapter Fourteen
Melody had been sitting on the edge of the guest room bed for twenty minutes, staring at the wall. Beat was right, they needed all the rest they could garner, because, to put it mildly, tomorrow was going to be a challenge and a half. But she couldn’t seem to make herself lie down and close her eyes. Not with Beat’s words lingering in her head.
But I have a way to manage it.
Pushing him once for a more detailed response had been overstepping. Hadn’t it? When they were alone, though, like they’d been in the kitchen, nothing felt off-limits. It was like they could finally let down their guards and just . . . be. A sort of magic she didn’t have with anyone else. But he’d stopped short of sharing his secret with her—and now she couldn’t stop picking up theories and discarding them. Not out of sheer curiosity, although there was some of that.
But more because she could sense the answer was a huge part of him that he held back.
Melody didn’t have a claim on all Beat’s secrets and intricacies, obviously. She only wanted him to know that he could lay them on her. That she would understand. That he didn’t have to shoulder something difficult alone.
A muffled sound reached her through the wall. It was brief and could have been a plane passing in the distance, perhaps lowering its equipment to land at JFK or LaGuardia. She knew that sound well. So why was her pulse galloping in the wake of it?
She’d almost convinced herself that she’d imagined Beat having what felt like an erection when she stumbled coming out of the SUV. That hard ridge against her thigh was his phone, right? But in general, people didn’t carry their phone front and center. Nor were phones so large. There was also the matter of him hissing a breath when she pressed against it . . . and maybe she hadn’t imagined his arousal?
What if it hadn’t been for her, though?
It was totally possible that Beat’s erection was basic anticipation of blowing off the day’s natural steam? Did men get hard thinking about masturbating? Was he masturbating right now?
Melody shuddered through an exhale and squeezed her legs together. Exhilaration trickled down to her toes, her head falling back. Heat bloomed between her thighs and an invisible feather tickled the inside of her belly. She tried to separate the sensations from Beat and just enjoy them for what they were, but without his image, the memory of his touch, his lingering energy, the need began to subside.
“No,” she breathed, the need starting to rekindle when a gruff sound slid beneath the door. It would be a violation of privacy to go inspect that sound, but she found herself balanced on the balls of her feet nonetheless, her ears hunting the air for another one of those deep burrs of sound. When another one finally came, her skin grew so sensitive that the mere act of breathing was nearly unbearable.
She would just go out into the hallway. Maybe she could hear him better there and when would she get this chance again? To be near this human being who attracted her so intensely? To memorize his scent and sound?
Sucking in a deep breath and holding it, Melody eased open the guest room door and stepped out into the dark hallway. The apartment was silent, dead silent, for long moments. Then she heard an unsteady gasp from the other side of Beat’s bedroom door and her knees almost buckled. She pressed the flat of her palm to the wall for support and took one tiny step closer. Thirty seconds. She would give herself thirty seconds.
The creak of a bedspring tightened something in her core so brutally, her toes curled into the carpet runner, her free hand lifting to twist in the front of her nightshirt—
Beat’s bedroom door opened.
He stood there shirtless in the lamplight, his chest rising and falling in great heaves, sweat dotting his brow and upper lip. A thick curve shaped the front of his sweatpants, pulling the material away from his body in a way that was . . . sexual and private and not for her eyes. But she couldn’t stop looking at him to save the world, because he was the most beautiful person on the planet, his eyes cloaked in shadows, hair finger fumbled, body carved with muscle.
“You made a sound,” he rasped.
She shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”
“You did.”
“Maybe it was a plane getting ready to land . . .”
Her words trailed off into hard breathing, because he emerged from the room, coming toward her in a prowling, purposeful way and she was so overcome by being his destination that she started to shake. She was shaking, head to toe, when he flattened her between his strapping body and the wall. “Mel.”
“Hold on,” was all she could think to say. “I just . . . y-you have to stop touching me.”
Immediately, he pressed his palms to the wall beside her head and shifted so they were no longer touching. But his nearness set off eruptions in her nerve endings anyway. Not a phone. That was definitely not a phone. There weren’t even pockets in those sweatpants. “Because you want me to stop?”
“No, because I’m going to embarrass myself,” she said on an exhale.
“No. I love the way you’re fucked-up over me.” He crowded in tighter again and dropped his mouth to her ear, his lips grazing her lobe in a way that made her see stars. “Mel, I like things a little fucked-up.”
This was it.
They were on the precipice of sharing his secret. It was so much at once. Having every line of his body corresponding to hers, that rough, intimate press, and his trust within reach. Melody’s heart hammered wildly, not sure if she could stand any more without collapsing under the weight of having so many pieces of him at the same time. Still . . . “Tell me.”
“I’d rather talk about what you like.” She felt, rather than saw, his brows knit together. “It sort of feels like I’m the only one who should know.”
A single word gusted out of her. “Oh.”
“Give me back permission to touch you, Peach,” he begged into her neck.