Page 72 of The Troublemaker

He took a step back, because you couldn’t say it any stronger than that, that was for damn sure. “Okay. Text me when you get home and let me know you’re okay.”

“Fine.”

And then she turned and walked away from him, and he knew that... Well, he’d messed it up. Big time.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

SHELETHERSELFCRY. All the way back to her house.

She was tired, and she probably should’ve let him give her a ride, but she couldn’t stand... She didn’t know what was happening to her. She thought that she might be going crazy.You do know what’s happening to you. You do know.

That kiss.

She had never been kissed before.

She found her hand drifting up to her mouth.

It was shaking, her hand. She was shaking. From the inside out. Everything was a mess. Especially her.

She was an absolute disaster.

And she couldn’t stop replaying the moment over and over in her head. The velvet glide of his tongue against hers. She had never thought that she would want another person’s tongue in her mouth. There were just things that she had known would be an inevitability of marriage, and she had gone ahead and decided that everything would be fine when she was in that position. That it would all work itself out. Because it was the natural order of things. It had made as much sense to her as anything. But now the problem was...

She had felt the way his body fitted against hers. Big and hard and hot.

And he had...tasted her. It had been deep, unflinching and sexual. She had no idea what she was supposed to do with the feelings that it left behind. With the scorched earth that it left in her wake.

She’d had no idea.

She was so grateful when she got to her house, and she fumbled with the doorknob with numb fingers and locked it behind her, going down the hall to the shower. She turned it on and waited for it to get hot while she peeled her clothes away from her body.

She looked at herself in the mirror, but this time she knew why she was being critical. This time she knew why she was worried about how she looked.

When you slept with someone, they saw you naked.

She should be thinking about what Byron would see when she took her clothes off, but instead she found herself wondering about Lachlan. She could imagine, far too easily, those intense blue eyes staring at her. Her small breasts and her pale nipples. At her rather slim hips and the pale golden triangle there at the juncture of her thighs.

What would he think about that?

He’d seen so many women naked. And she had never seen a naked man. It was all well and good to talk about how you knew mechanics because you had engaged in many aspects of the facts of life with animals.

It was almost hilarious. Because it went right back to her and Lachlan’s little snippy fight when she stitched him up.

Animals were more complicated because there were more of them. Because there was more to know. More to do. People were just people.

But what people did was entirely different than what animals did. It was entirely different than the where and the why.

It wasn’t for procreation. It was for desire.

People did things that were bad for them. People did things that could hurt them. They did things because they felt good in the moment, but had desperate and drastic consequences for the rest of their lives.

Yes. People were unreliable. And complicated. And...

She could feel steam begin to pour over the top of the shower, and she stepped inside. She soaped up her body and couldn’t ignore how sensitive the dips and hollows on her skin felt. She avoided her breasts, because her nipples were tight, and she had thought it was from the cold, but the fact that the warm shower did nothing to ease it proved otherwise.

There was an uncomfortable slickness between her legs.

I’m wet.

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