Page 83 of The Honeymoon Hack
“No idea, but…” Brie’s eyes lit up, and she pulled me toward the white noise machine. “Not only did I find the photos of Scarlett, but I found an email about Dad. A trail about someone depositing fifty thousand dollars into his account before his arrest.” She tossed her phone onto the desk. “And there were dozens of other files. I got some uploaded, but I barely scratched the surface of what’s hidden on their server.”
“You need to be more careful next time.” I looked her square in the eyes, just as I had to pull her away from the KVM. How many times had she gotten so deep into a problem that she needed a physical reminder of reality? “If security had caught you accessing those files, that’s as far as it would have gotten. We’d be done. You’d have seen the information, and we’d have little to no evidence.”
“But they didn’t catch me,” she said, tapping a finger against my chest. “Because you were there.”
Something in her posture shifted. The excitement about the mission mixed with something softer, her eyes holding mine a beat too long. She shifted her pointed finger on my chest to her whole palm. We’d been in these close quarters for five days now, dancing around what had happened on the beach, pretending nothing had changed.
The kiss we’d shared in the server room told me that everythinghadchanged.
And I was done ignoring it.
“Brie.” I stepped closer. “The kiss?—”
“Was an effective cover.” She said the words too quickly, as though she’d been repeating them to herself. But she didn’t remove her hand from my chest.
“Was it?” I closed my fingers around her hand, surprised when she let me after all the time she’d spent avoiding me in private. “Because it didn’t feel that way to me.”
Her eyes searched mine, uncertainty flickering across her features. Outside these walls, we played the adorable couple; inside them, we’d maintained the careful fiction of friendship, tiptoeing around the electricity that sparked between us whenever we got too close. “You would have done the same with Ashley if she hadn’t broken her arm.”
“Thatwould have been for cover.”
“Will—” Her voice hitched, brows drawing down.
“I’ve been thinking about this for days,” I said softly, moving another step closer. “About us. About what we could have if we stopped running from it.”
She didn’t step back, but a war raged in her eyes—want battling fear.
“The truth is…” I dropped my voice as I pulled her hand down to place it on my hip. “I want to kiss you again. Not for the mission. Not because someone might be watching. Because I’ve wanted to for years.”
For a heartbeat, we stood frozen, my words hanging between us. Then suddenly we were moving toward each other at the same time.
Our lips found each other. It wasn’t the calculated kiss on the beach or the urgent cover in the server room. This was years of suppressed longing finally breaking free. Her hands traveled around my lower back as she pulled me closer.
She made the same sound against my lips as she had on the beach. The whimper—full of hunger and desperation—went straight to my cock.
Briewantedthis. It was so clear.
My fingers found their way to the lower rim of her glasses, pushing them up onto her head, and I backed her against the wall.
Her hands fisted in my shirt as if she couldn’t get close enough. The taste of her, the feel of her curves pressed against me, the way she responded to every touch—it was everything I’d dreamed and more.
But then something changed. Her grip loosened, and I knew her fears were creeping in. Her kisses became tentative, and though her body still strained toward mine, her brain was pulling back.
She broke the kiss slowly, her forehead resting against mine.
“No,” she whispered between labored breaths. Was that to me or to herself? “We can’t do this.”
“Why not?” I stepped back only enough to see her clearly, keeping my voice soft. My dick urged me forward, protesting at the loss of contact. “You want it, too. I know you do.”
She slid slowly along the wall, out of my grip, her face contorting as though in pain. She wrapped her arms around herself, creating a barrier between us. “Because it’s a terrible idea. We’ve been through this before, Will. We know exactly how this ends.”
“We were kids.” The memory of her sneaking out of my workshop surfaced—her embarrassment when my mother showed up, her refusal to look at me, the weeks of awkward silence that followed.
“Nineteen isn’t kids!”
“We were virgins, Brie. It’s normal to be awkward after your first time.”
“No, we were stupid!” She threw her hands up sharply, her voice rising. “We thought it wouldn’t change anything, but it did, and it almost broke us apart.”
