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My jaw locked, muscles turning to stone. I took over securing her wrists with one hand and used my other to grip her by the hair, tilting her head back.

She squeaked in surprise, gazing up at me.

Waiting.

Her eyes glinted with indignation and desire as she breathed a slow death against my lips.

My head lowered until our mouths almost touched. “I told you to never ask me that.”

“I don’t care. Tell me.”

“No.”

Halley struggled to break free, her fight funneling back as her rosy-pink cheeks puffed with a frustration-filled breath. I didn’t slacken my hold, and she eventually deflated, collapsing back to the mat as I loomed over her. “Tell me what you wanted to do to me that night,” she said, the anger dissipating, replaced with deadly curiosity. “I need to hear it.”

I felt myself tearing through yellow tape.

My feet scuffing chalk lines.

And I embraced my own undoing as ruination filtered through my bloodstream.

“I would have taken you back to my apartment,” I said darkly, teeth gritted, my fist still tangled in her hair. “And we wouldn’t have made it to the bedroom before I knew what your pussy tasted like.”

We both froze.

Her eyes widened to saucers, lips parting on a sharp exhale.

I couldn’t believe I fucking said that.

A wave of panic surged through me with the knowing that I’d just crossed a line I could never uncross. My grip on her wrists loosened, defenses buckled.

Nineteen.

Tara’s best friend.

Half my age.

My ex’s makeshift foster kid.

A. Fucking. Teenager.

Swallowing hard, I stared down at her, spinning words inside my mind that could somehow untangle me from this fucked-up web.

But the shock in Halley’s eyes quickly evolved into something else. Something emboldened.

Something like…permission.

She wiggled beneath me, arching her back and sliding her hand south as I inched up from her chest. Her hand disappeared in the space between us, and I glanced down, watching as she slipped her fingers under the hem of her shirt and into the waistband of her underwear.

Oxygen strangled me. My heart rate rocketed to a deathlike pace. I held my breath so long, I swear I saw stars.

And then she pulled her hand out of her underwear, her gaze locked and loaded on mine.

Two berry-tipped fingers came back glistening.

Soaked with arousal.

I watched, shellshocked, as she reached out and pressed her fingertips to my parted lips and I almost fucking died. My cock throbbed painfully, still nestled in the heat between her legs, aching to be released from its confinements and to thrust inside of her.

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