Page 36 of Where the Little Birds Go (Little Bird Duet 1)

“Why would Beck blame herself for not loving Ryker from the start? Any logical person would want what she did. Anyone would choose to go out and live their lives instead of being saddled with someone as intense as Ryker.”

“That’s not how love works, Corbin.”

He cocks his head. “Then tell me how it works. Explain it to me, Little Bird, b

ecause I’m clearly not following. You say that love is painful and nearly impossible to find. You believe that there’s a right time and place for everything, and that if it doesn’t work out then that’s all there is to it. What happens then?”

My lips part … then close.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says, grabbing my leg and pulling me forward. I yelp when my butt grazes his thigh and his hand grips one of my legs while the other awkwardly spreads to make room for his body as he leans forward.

“Corbin—”

“We fuck up. Over. And over. And over.” He twists his body so he’s between my thighs, hands resting on other side of my torso as he hovers over me. “You said it best. We’ll keep making mistakes because we don’t want to learn. Are you going to deny that you haven’t thought about us? Felt anything for me? Remembered what it was like when we were together?”

My hands shake as they find his chest, but I don’t have the energy to push him away like I mean to. “Are you really asking me that? I’m not the one who walked away! You are. Don’t ask me stupid questions about if I remember what it was like because you know I do. You know how much it hurts that there’s not one thing I’ve forgotten. It fucking haunts me, Corbin. How much I gave to you, expected from you, it hurts so bad that I want to rip my heart out until it’s clean of you.”

“Windows of opportunity open and close all the time in this industry,” he tells me without any real emotion spattered across his face. “If you stop for even a second then you become irrelevant.”

I’m not sure why he says that. “You’ve never been irrelevant, Corbin.”

His hand brushes my cheek. “Not to you, Little Bird. Never to you. But the world I threw myself into? That’s different. If I called you sooner, came home sooner, I would have had nothing to show for leaving in the first place.”

My lip quivers. “And you do now?”

His brows furrow. “Do you not see what I’ve built for myself? The name? The movies? The deals? I’m exactly where I want to be in this business. It’s everything outside my career that I want to change. So, what do you mean?”

“The way I see it,” I say slowly, “the only thing you have that truly matters is a marriage certificate to a woman you don’t even love. I’d like to think the Corbin I knew back then wouldn’t have sacrificed that much for an image he can’t even change if he wanted to.”

This time, he doesn’t answer.

My fingertips dig into his cotton shirt, bunching it as I clench a fistful in my hands. “I have been in failed relationship after failed relationship because I’ve never been able to get over you. I’ve had to see pictures of you on magazines in stores holding your wife’s hand and kissing her and hugging her while I buy food for one because guys realize I’m not worth the complication. I’ve let myself down for loving you and the worst part is…”

Don’t say it.

“I can’t seem to stop.” I choke out the last word through the tears that trail down my cheek.

His throat bobs as he brushes them away, his own eyes looking nothing like the bright silver the world is used to admiring. The dark tones are pits of agony that I know are reflections of my own.

Then … it happens.

The years of separation.

Of anger.

Of heartache.

Everything that’s left me buried in work just so I don’t have to think about the boy who left me behind comes crashing down.

The lips on mine are familiar yet foreign, soft but hard, searching and needing. He leans into me until our bodies are pressed together and a satisfying weight settles on top of me as his mouth and teeth and tongue bring me back to a time when we fumbled and laughed and worked our way through every kiss. He wasn’t a virgin when we met and knowing that back then killed me a little. Sabrina Christy was a name I’d have engraved in my head when he admitted she was his first—some old classmate at the last school he was in. I envied her ability to have something I couldn’t while he took the very same thing from me when I offered it.

And now his experience is obvious. Corbin Callum knows what he’s doing. My bet is he’s had plenty of practice since the days of fumbling with bra hooks and cursing at leggings.

I want to hate him for it—for having so much experience when the amount of men I’ve let in my life since him is so minimal. Yet, I can’t find myself to feel anything other than desire and yearning and guilt, all wrapped up into one.

His tongue tastes and twists with mine, and I drink him in every time he angles his head for a deeper kiss. My arms wrap around his neck as my pelvis arches into his until I feel something deliciously hard brush against my inner thigh.

“Fuck,” he curses, moving his lips down my neck and his hands down my body. I’m panting and writhing and wanting and hating myself more and more by the second.

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