Lips twitching, he sweeps his thumb from my cheek downward, then slowly along my jawline. “You’re always beautiful, Lyra.”
Heartbeat all over the place, skin singing from his touch, I grin.
Shaking his head at me, he steps back and closes the door.
“Oh, wait, my phone,” I say after he’s gotten into the jeep and fired up the engine.
He shifts into reverse anyway. “You’re getting a new one.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause that’s how they found you,” he replies. “You were being tracked.”
ChapterTwenty-Three
“So I know I’m not just taking.”
Lyra
Torin takes me back to hisplace.
As he keys open the door, I exhale a peaceful sigh, because being on his porch feels like coming home from a long, arduous expedition.
Thisis where I’m supposed to be.
My sigh must have been more expressive than I thought, because he glances over his shoulder at me as he enters the house and asks. “You good?”
I nod, following him in.
“I’ll have your things picked up from Monica’s later,” he tells me. “You can grab something from my room for now. Gonna be in my office for a bit. Need to get on top of this.”
“I thought you were on vacation.”
He gives me a look. “Haven’t been on ‘vacation’ since you got here.”
With a sweet and innocent smile, I ask, “I’m a pain in your ass?”
A semblance of a smile settles on his lips. “You know what you are.”
After a long, heart-fluttering stare, he turns in one direction and I in the other.
On dirty feet, I pad upstairs to his room. Giddy to have permission to it at last. I stop outside the door and press my palm to the wood. How many times have I stood outside this door, ear pressed to the wood, holding my breath so I could hear his.
I turn the knob.
It’s open.
It never is. Except for that one time...
Something delicious unfurls in my belly as I remember... Him sitting at the side of the bed, his hard cock gripped in his fist...
With quiet, tentative steps, I enter the room. And it’s as though he’s left a part of his soul in here, because I canfeelhim. As strongly as if he wereright here, beside me, in front of me, behind me, breathing hotly down my neck.
His bed is unmade. A half-empty tumbler sits on a coaster on his nightstand. Black bed-slippers askew on the floor at his bedside.
With feather-light steps, I wander around his room, letting the tips of my fingers trail over every furniture, every surface, every random item.
Mine, my heart whispers.