Page 75 of Mine To Take

Because I still care about him.

“How long have you been awake?” My voice is level, without inflection or any hint of the chaos inside me.

“A few minutes.” He shrugs, then approaches the bed. “I still like to watch you sleep,” he says, sitting on the edge and angling his body to face me.

I still like to watch you sleep.

A casual reference to the past. Now that I can see his face, there’s nothing to read there. Of course, he has always been good at keeping his feelings hidden.

However, in his voice, I can sense the wonder, that it can still feel like this, after all this time.

It’s the same thing I feel.

With his eyes totally focused on me, he strokes my hair, then cups my face and sets his forehead on mine.

“Cora.”

I don’t say anything. Words cannot communicate how I feel, about him, about us, about everything that’s happened.

I love you.

I squash the forbidden thought, sending it back into the depths where it has always lurked, waiting for a vulnerable moment, a chance to break me and make me his slave again.

I love you.

“No.”

“What?” He lifts my chin so our eyes meet. I want to run my fingers through his hair, to lose myself in his beautiful gaze. I want to bare myself to him, to show him my whole self and let him see how the destruction from losing him still eats at my core.

“Nothing.” I shake my head.

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

His eyes are reaching deep into mine. Curious, maybe even hopeful.

Don’t hope, Cora. Last night shouldn’t have happened.

“We…” I pull in a breath. “This…” I shrug. “We shouldn’t have.”

I see his throat work. He turns away and rises again, going back to the window.

“Well, we did.” His voice is flat.

What does he want? What does he want me to say? I can’t let him back into my life if that’s what he wants. I can’t risk the kind of hurt…I sigh. “You should have let me go, that first time. You should never have come back to Italy. We should have let things end when you left Florence.”

“As tempting as it is to focus on what we regret, it’s not a productive way to spend our time, and it doesn’t provide any solutions.” He turns back to the bed. “I want you, Cora. I want to forget about you, but not as much as I want to fuck you, again and again, until I conquer my obsession with you.”

I know I should reject the idea as soon as it comes out his mouth, but it doesn’t help that the images of us together, bodies entwined, giving each other the most incomparable pleasure…have been implanted in my mind, and with those images comes a flush of arousal, the familiar quivering between my legs, reactions he can get out of me without even touching me.

He’s still looking at me. “You want to say no…”

I throw up my hands. “What else could I possibly say?”

“That we can have this…” He gestures toward the bed. “For now, at least…and why can’t we? There’s obviously something explosive that happens when we come together.”

“For how long?”

“A few weeks?” He shrugs. “I need to let you go, Cora. And it’s been impossible to do so all these years. Call it a need for closure. I still want you, and you obviously still want me. Neither of us will get any closure as long as this desire is allowed to grow, unexpressed, unfulfilled…” He trails off, leaving the rest to my imagination.

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