Page 70 of The Art of You

Bella: I’m touching myself, too.

“Of course you are. Such a bad girl.” I sent it as a voice message, my words a damn near growl. I pushed the covers back so when I was ready to come, it’d be on my bare chest instead of on the bedding.

She replied with a voice memo.Finally.

I pressed play, and her breathy words had me clenching my jaw. “Make up your mind, sailor. Want me to be your good girl or your bad one?”

I responded immediately, gritting out, “I just want you to be mine.”

I hit send before I realized what I’d said, my abs contracting and my body tensing as I came, then finally relaxed for the first time since the accident.

I closed my eyes, my left hand hanging lazily at my side still clutching the phone. The chime from her message woke up my brain, and I lifted up the phone to read it.

Bella: Does that mean you’ve decided I’m worth the risk?

She was worth it all. Living. Dying. And everything in between. That wasn’t the issue.

Me: I don’t want to hurt you. You get that, right? If it was just my feelings to consider, I’d have made you mine a long time ago.

Bella: Well, maybe almost dying will finally wake you up. Help you see your feelings matter, too. And to understand that taking a chance on us being “more” is much better than living our lives always wondering if we should’ve . . .

Me: I did the “almost dying” thing for a living in the Navy. That never woke me up. But almost losing you this weekend has.

Me: I’m trying, I promise.

Bella: That’s all I want.

Me: Now, are you coming to my bed . . . or what?

Chapter 26

Isabella

“What areyou doing roaming the halls in the middle of the night?”

Enzo’s voice froze me in place, and I hung my head, trying to come up with an excuse. The hall was only lit up by a motion light near the baseboards. “Midnight snack?”Why’d I say that like a question?

“Sure you were.” He didn’t wait for me to turn. Nope, Enzo went around and cock-blocked me. He even went so far as to open his inked arms and set each hand on the opposite walls to really prove his apparent opinion on the matter. Standing before me all edgy and tense, he may as well have been playing a twisted game of Monopoly. I didn’t need to see his eyes to read,Do not pass Go and do not collect any orgasms.

For his information, I had no plans to “collect” anything but a decent sleep. I’d already had two O’s this evening, one by Hudson’s hand earlier and one by my own a minute ago.

But perhaps I needed to give Enzo a chance to explain instead of putting words in his mouth.

“I don’t want to be alone.” My defensefelt as floppy as post-rain hair. It sounded pathetic even if it was true. “We were just going to sleep together.”

The barrier of his arms fell like a bridge being lowered—slow suspension and controlled movement. “I may be laid-back lately, but I don’t want to hear about my little sister having sex.”

I swatted his chest with the back of my hand. “Sleep as in sleep. That’s all we planned to do. He’s not going to bang me under our parents’ roof, especially not with you guys in the house. Jeez.”Gone Baby Gone.It wasn’t just a movie name, but seemingly the appropriate title for my mouth.Ugh.

“It’s a damn good thing you bumped into me, not the others,” he grumble-growled. It was apparently a thing when it came to my brothers, and they did it well. Could’ve taught a masterclass in how to make words leave their mouths in the form of wild animal-like sounds.

“I didn’tbumpinto you. You stopped me.” Semantics, but it was the best I could do right now.

“Do we need to havethe birds and the bees talk?”

Okay, the humor in his tone that time was not only unexpected, it was such a dramatic change that I had to wonder if I was sleepwalking.

“No, Bianca did in fourth grade. And Mom gave me the ‘Men are from Mars, and Women are from Venus’ speech half a dozen times more than necessary, too.”

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