Page 53 of Hold on Tight

Then:

“Mommy!”

A small but demanding voice from upstairs.

She pulled away. Breathless, flushed. Gorgeous. All wrong. All right.

“Mommy, did youforget? I need you to snuggle me.”

She laughed. He couldn’t. He was wound too tight around what they’d been doing. He craved more. More of her.

“I’d better go tuck him in,” she said, still breathing hard, smiling at him.

“I’ll leave,” he said.

She scrutinized him. He wanted to look away. He wanted to hide under something so she couldn’t look into his eyes with that peculiar penetration.

“No. Please don’t. Unless you want to.”

He did and he didn’t.

He wanted to stay, to find out what happened next. Where else she was as soft and yielding as her mouth. How else she could use those hands. Who would direct their bodies, how they’d cling, where they’d move. The first removal of an article of clothing.

How far this could, and would, go.

And he wanted to leave. To slip out from under the layers of complication already piling up.Sam, and sex, he’d said. But really? Could it happen that way?

And if it could, if he could make this only the scratching of an itch, would he?

He wasn’t sure.

As usual, since the blast had rearranged his world, he had no idea what he wanted.

“I don’t know,” he confessed.

“Then stay, okay? Just sit there a minute. I’ll put him to bed, and we’ll—we’ll figure it out.”

He knew his eyes were giving him away, showing her all his doubts, his confusion. “Will we?”

“Maybe it’s simpler than you think.”

Nothing had been simple in so long, it was impossible to imagine. “Maybe it’s more complicated than you think.”

She smiled. “Maybe the truth’s somewhere in the middle.”

“Go,” he said. “Put Sam to bed.”

“Will you be here when I come back downstairs?”

He regarded her for a moment. Her gaze was steady on his. She was a brave woman. None of what she’d done to raise a child alone could have been easy. None of what she was doing now, flirting with his broken spirit, testing the boundary line where complicated bled into disastrous, was easy. But she was doing it.

Years ago, at the lake, she’d been reckless. But he didn’t sense recklessness now. There was no desperation in her. There was calculation. She was marching forward, weighing what it meant to engage.

He wanted to know her better. He wanted to know what she’d be like under fire.

He wanted to know what she’d be like underhim.

Most of all, he wanted to be as honest with her as she’d been with him that first night when they’d kissed and she’d said, “If you don’t want to have sex with me, that’s fine. I get it. Just man up and say you don’t want this.”

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