Текст книги "Darker the Release "

Автор книги: Claire Kent

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter 3

Caleb was used to feeling guilty, but he could usually shake it off better than this.

However, something about the clash between his feelings for Kelly and his conversation with Moore had left him with a guilt so heavy it was weighing him down.

He liked who he was with Kelly, and he didn’t like other things he’d done—the other man he’d been—to raise their heads in her vicinity.

There was nothing he could do about the sins of his past. They were done, and no recompense could be offered to absolve him of them. Most of the time he was fine with that, but he couldn’t shake the feeling tonight. The weight of it intensified everything else he was feeling too.

It was probably why he got so jealous when Wes leaned over and whispered something in Kelly’s ear as they were leaving.

He had no idea what his friend was telling her, but he didn’t like it. Not because he thought Kelly would ever respond to the other man, but because it indicated something about her that he didn’t know.

Her reaction was just a casual smile, but it didn’t look genuine.

Something bothered her about what Wes had said, and she just shrugged it off when he asked.

Caleb didn’t say anything else. He just took Kelly by the arm and led her outside to where his chauffeured car was waiting.

He wasn’t sure why it bothered him so much, but it did. Wes had no business talking to Kelly in private, and Kelly had no business keeping it from him.

He told himself to get over it. Nothing important had happened. It was just one of those nights where everything stood out in starker contrast. Where every feeling, thought, and impulse seemed stronger and more significant than it usually would.

It probably had something to do with the hot sex they’d had before they left the house, and it definitely had something to do with the lingering guilt from his conversation with Moore.

Kelly and what had happened with Moore were among the few things in the world that left Caleb feeling out of control.

“Wes seemed nice,” Kelly said, seeming a little distracted. She looked like sex embodied in lush, golden form in her red dress and tousled fall of hair, and his body reacted to the sight of her.

It almost always did.

Caleb wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say in response to that comment, but he really didn’t want to talk about Wes right now. “He’s okay.”

“You’ve known him a long time?”

“Since elementary school. Why?”

She gave a little shrug. “Just curious. Is he married?”

Caleb didn’t like the direction of these questions. Why the hell should Kelly care about Wes anyway? “No.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Why?”

“They’re normal questions, aren’t they? Isn’t he your friend?”

“I guess.”

“Why are you so grumpy?” Kelly asked him with a frown. Her dress had shifted as she’d adjusted in the seat and was now revealing an even larger expanse of her deep cleavage.

“I am not grumpy,” Caleb gritted out, feeling like the hairs were standing up on the back of his neck. “I just don’t know why we need to have a whole conversation about Wes, if that’s all right with you.”

Kelly stuck out her chin as the car pulled into the street and headed back to Caleb’s house outside the city, which was over an hour away. “Are you jealous?” she asked, looking almost surprised. Her eyes seemed tired and a little strained—as if she’d had an emotionally stressful evening herself, although he wasn’t sure why or how that would have been the case—but they were now flashing with something that taunted him.

“I am not jealous.” He wished this topic had never come up. Wished he’d not attended this party after all. Wished one of his few friends in the world hadn’t shown up this evening.

Kelly took a deep breath, and something about that breath struck Caleb as strange—as if she was gearing herself up somehow. But then he forgot all about the strangeness when she scooted over next to him on the supple leather seat. She gave him a teasing grin and slid her hand from his belly up to his shoulder. “I think maybe you are jealous,” she murmured.

“Kelly,” Caleb warned, his impatience boiling up. He needed to be left alone so he could recover his control—of himself, of his feelings, of his guilt. If he didn’t, the roiling intensity inside him might escape, and Caleb couldn’t allow that to happen.

“What?” she replied, tilting her face up toward him. “Why don’t you just admit it? You’re jealous and angry because your friend made a move on me.”

Caleb made a harsh noise in his throat and jerked toward her. “So he did make a move on you?”

The corners of Kelly’s full lips turned up, although her eyes still looked rather stressed. Which didn’t make much sense, since Kelly should have just spent a relatively uneventful evening. “Of course he did. And what would you do if I told you I was…tempted by his offer?”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. He knew she was teasing him on purpose. He knew it. But he couldn’t suppress the feral response. “Were you?” he asked thickly.

Her eyebrows lifted. “What would you do if I was?”

“Were you?” he demanded again, leaning toward her and grabbing one of her upper arms with his hand.

He was being irrational. This was absolutely stupid. Why the hell couldn’t he act like his normal self again?

He was being played by her. She was trying to get him to let go of his feelings, and he was allowing it. Letting her play him.

Almost as if he wanted to let himself go.

“Would you try to convince me otherwise?” Kelly teased, her voice husky and seductive. She took one of his hands and placed it on her thigh, just where the slit of her skirt exposed the bare skin above her knee. “Would you try to prove to me that you have more to offer than he does?”

“You already know what I have to offer you,” he managed to say, in a semblance of his natural voice. Every word he spoke was rougher and throatier than it should have been, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he was acting this way.

His hand remained on her thigh, and he could feel both the fabric of her dress and her supple skin beneath his palm. He didn’t move it any farther, though. He’d always been happy to follow her lead whenever she wanted to try something adventurous sexually. But something about this felt strange—and the strangeness wasn’t just from his nearness to losing control.

Something about Kelly felt…off. As if she were baiting him this way in spite of her mood rather than because of it.

But that wouldn’t make any sense at all.

Kelly shifted until her mouth was next to his ear. She lowered her hand once more to his belly, just above Caleb’s partially hardened cock.

He’d been semierect for a while now, his arousal feeding off his other intense feelings.

“Caleb,” Kelly whispered, her breath wafting over the sensitive skin of his ear. “Why do you keep holding back? Let yourself go. Show me why I shouldn’t be tempted by anyone else.”

Then she covered his hand with hers on her thigh, closed her fingers around his wrist, and slid his hand up beneath the skirt of her dress. All the way up her thigh.

Up to the juncture between her legs.

He could feel the warmth of her through the fabric of her panties.

His cock jumped painfully to full erection as a flash of hot desire slammed into him.

“Fuck me, Caleb,” Kelly murmured, her voice an erotic caress, a tantalizing torture. “Are you really going to make me beg?”

Caleb grabbed her upper body and devoured her mouth with a hard kiss, finally letting go of the restraint that had been holding his instinct in check. She clung to him. Moaned into his mouth. And Caleb channeled all the smoldering intensity of the evening into claiming her as his.

His nostrils flared as his mouth moved roughly against hers—sucking, stroking, exploring, and nipping. His hands worked her over ceaselessly, touching her everywhere he could reach. She’d begun to whimper, and he loved the passionate sound of it. He reveled in the way she always responded to his touch.

Then she tore her mouth away, panting and flushed. “Now, Caleb,” she demanded, turning away from him and beginning to maneuver on the seat. “Fuck me now.”

He blinked, dazed with desire and still trying to hold on to the threads that kept his control intact. He stared at Kelly blankly until he figured out what she was doing.

She’d turned over on the broad expanse of the seat beside them and was now positioning herself on her hands and knees, her head toward the window.

Caleb blinked again, his eyes focused intently on the lush swell of flesh—her hips round and full beneath the slick fabric of her skirt. Then he saw that she’d reached behind her and was bunching up the silk, baring her ass to his sight.

He made a hoarse sound in his throat and was briefly afraid he was going to lose it before he even got in position.

But then, swallowing over the shocked thrill, he adjusted his body too. Raised himself up on his knees beside her and started unbuttoning his trousers.

The backseat of a car wasn’t the ideal place for fucking a woman doggie style, but there was plenty of room, and the slight instability in their positioning only made it that much more exciting. They had privacy, since the little window between the front and back of the car was closed.

As long as the driver didn’t slam on his brakes.

Kelly was looking at him over her shoulder, urging him to hurry with moaned repetitions of “fuck me” and “now.”

Then Caleb pulled her ass cheeks apart. Nudged at her until he found her entrance. Then wedged his cock into her channel.

The clasp of her body was tight and warm, but she wasn’t as wet and pliant as he’d expected. She was very tight.

He adjusted behind her, waiting for her to relax. She’d turned forward again and was facing the window. Her hair was falling all around her. She was breathing heavily—just as he was—but something about her body seemed different.

Every instinct inside him was screaming at him to thrust, to drive himself home, to take her, to claim her as his.

But he kept getting those prickles of uncertainty, so he made himself bite out, “Okay?”

She looked back over her shoulder at him, a familiar, sultry look in her eyes. “Yeah,” she breathed. “Good. Let go, Caleb. Fuck me. Take me like this.”

Her raw urging displaced the faint thread of concern, and he felt a new, powerful throb of base instinct. With a harsh grunt, he pulled back and drove into her, his cock sliding nearly out and then pushing its way deep into the hot depths of her body.

“Yeah,” she gasped. “Fuck me.”

So he let himself go after all. Released the hold he’d had on his impulses and thrust into her hard from behind, the powerful motion of his pelvis channeling his need to dominate, to possess, to claim.

He was sliding inside her fairly easily, and he could feel the tight friction on his cock and the indirect stimulation of his balls coalesce into a rising climax. The limitations of their location weren’t much of an issue, as Caleb could brace himself by widening the stance of his thighs.

Kelly was staring down at the leather seat, her body jostling every time he pushed into her, and she was releasing breathless grunts in time to his thrusting.

But as the repeated motion leveled off Caleb’s sensations momentarily, he started experiencing those nagging questions again. What did that stressed look in Kelly’s eyes mean? And why was she still not wet around the stroking of his cock inside her? And were those grunts of pleasure or merely an involuntary response to the momentum of his pounding into her?

“Kelly?” Caleb gritted out. “Good?”

“Yeah,” she cried on his next stroke in. “Fuck, yeah.” She raised herself up a little until she was bracing herself with her hands on the car door in front of her. Then she turned her head to look at him, something wild and frantic in her eyes. “It’s good.”

Caleb released his held breath at her assurance and leaned over her, bracing one of his hands next to hers against the door of the car. He kept thrusting, now pushing her whole pelvis forward on each thrust. “You like it like this?” he rasped, his momentum flaring up again as he felt her body moving with the power of his.

“Yeah,” Kelly gasped, turning her face forward again. “Fuck me from behind. Fuck me like an animal.”

Caleb was grunting now as he levered into her, his pelvis slapping against her ass on every thrust, his trousers pushed down to his knees.

Kelly’s verbal responses were getting louder and more urgent, and Caleb waited for her body to start shaking the way it did just before she came. It didn’t, however. It didn’t seem to tense up at all.

That heavy doubt sprang up again as he started to vaguely wonder if Kelly was as into this as he was.

But then she cried out, “God, Caleb. Harder, harder. I want it harder.”

He growled, forgot everything else in the red-hot rush of primal need. He pounded into her as she’d urged, letting primitive instinct turn him into a rutting animal. His cock was ramming into her roughly now, shoving her body forward with rhythmic force while her frantic cries kept urging him on.

He felt strong, powerful, invulnerable. Threatened by nothing—not past sins, not secrets, not Kelly, not his own feelings.

Until he couldn’t stop the mounting sensations. Let the wild rush of it push him over the edge.

Kelly was crying out hoarsely—it sounded like pleasure—when Caleb felt himself coming in a hard, fast, blinding release.

His pelvis thrashed clumsily against her hips as the spasms ripped through him, and then he felt the pulsing spurts of his release.

He was gasping and sweating beneath his tux when he felt himself come down.

Kelly was gasping too—still not looking at him—and her breaths sounded harsh and painful.

And instead of the familiar relaxation that usually overtook him after a physical release, he felt vaguely sick and dizzy. Not from the motion of the car.

He pulled his cock out. As soon as he’d pulled back, Kelly kind of collapsed onto the seat. But then she immediately moved to a sitting position, curling her body in on itself.

He couldn’t seem to bring himself to look at her face, afraid of what he might see there.

His chest feeling like it was constricting, Caleb straightened up.

He had a sick, heavy feeling in his gut, although he hadn’t yet explicitly worked out what was causing it. Just a minute ago he’d been glorying in some kind of primal power over his world.

Now he couldn’t even remember what it had felt like.

He moved back to sit beside a motionless Kelly, heard her panting, really looked at her for the first time.

He saw that she had gone sheet white, all color washed out of her face. She was breathing erratically, as if she were close to panic, and holding her stomach.

And Caleb felt a surge of adrenaline, his innate response to any crisis.

He knew the signs well enough. Kelly was going to either vomit or pass out.

“Kelly?” he asked roughly, his voice cutting through the stunned, heavy silence that had followed their fucking.

She was gasping almost frantically, and she’d broken out in a sweat. Then her hand went out to fumble at the switches on the door. “Window.”

He found the release and lowered the window on her side of the car, letting in a gust from outside. Kelly scooted toward the open window, sucking in deep breaths and leaning her face as far toward the night air as she could.

Caleb felt the surge of cold air flood into the car interior and sat perfectly still. He watched Kelly’s pale, breathless desperation silently. A kind of dread started building up in his gut, replacing his crisis response, which gradually faded when some of the color bled back into Kelly’s face.

Caleb didn’t think. He couldn’t really process thought. Just knew something had happened that couldn’t be good.

After a few minutes, Kelly rolled the window back up. Gave him a fleeting, embarrassed look and shifted back to lean against the seat. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “Felt sick all of a sudden.”

Caleb had known that and thought he knew why, but he was still trying to avoid admitting it. “Do you need something?”

Kelly was trembling now—violently, helplessly. Her teeth were actually chattering. “No. I must have just…eaten something bad.”

It was a flimsy excuse. And Caleb was only occasionally a fool.

He knew it wasn’t true.

He felt stupidly helpless all of a sudden. He had absolutely no idea what to do.

“Do you want something to drink?” he offered, feeling that same nauseating heaviness in his stomach and on top of it a tearing ache in his chest. She looked so small, so fragile, so incredibly miserable. And he had somehow made her so.

“I wouldn’t say no to a ginger ale or something,” she murmured, hugging her arms across her chest, as if she were now cold.

It was the most bizarre shift of mood and experience. Caleb had been primally roused. Then in a frenzy of lust and dominance.

And now all of a sudden he felt ill—almost as ill as she looked—and the air in the car felt cold and thick and heavy.

Caleb leaned over to check the compartment in the car where there were usually some drinks stocked. “No ginger ale,” he said. “Just a couple of Cokes.”

“That would be great. Thanks.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Sorry about this.”

Caleb felt like someone had kicked him in the gut, but didn’t say anything as he pulled out a can of Coke, opened it, and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she mumbled, taking a sip and looking oddly young and vulnerable. Almost like a little girl—which made Caleb wonder how he’d just been fucking her so roughly a few minutes ago.

He stared at her for another minute, trying to push all the unsettling experiences of this evening to the back of his mind.

The worst thing he’d ever done—years ago now—coming back to haunt him.

Kelly, ghost white and trembling, because she’d let him fuck her.

When she obviously hadn’t wanted him.

He shrugged off the jacket of his tux because he couldn’t stand how violently she was shivering, and he wrapped it around her shoulders, pulled her against him, and waited to see if she’d pull away in disgust or in fear.

She didn’t. She just huddled against him, shivering.

Caleb could feel his own stomach churning and tried to process something—anything—that was happening here.

After an extended stretch of dead silence, he finally forced out, “Why did you let me do that?”

Kelly gasped and turned to look up at him. “I wanted it,” she insisted, her eyes wide and innocent. “It was good. I just got…carsick or something.”

Another pitiful excuse. Not even worth countering.

“Why did you let me do that?” he demanded again.

She wasn’t looking at him now. She was staring straight in front of her, seeing…nothing, as far as he knew. “I wanted it,” she repeated blankly. “I asked for it.”

“Why?”

A long pause. Then, “I’d never had sex in the back of a car before.”

“Kelly,” Caleb rasped, wishing he could just shake the truth out of her lips. “Why?”

She let out a long sigh. “I don’t know,” she admitted in a defeated tone. “I just did.”

Caleb closed his eyes, slammed with a wave of dizziness, which was an absurd reaction to something like this. His response to this entire encounter had been far more extreme than it should have been.

Yes, he’d fucked her roughly, but she had asked him to. If she hadn’t wanted it, then it was her responsibility to tell him rather than egg him on. True—their fucking had obviously been upsetting to her, but it wasn’t really his fault and shouldn’t make him feel so off-kilter. But it did.

Despite his attempt to deny it, the truth was threatening to level him anyway. Kelly had begged him to fuck her—but not because she’d wanted it. She hadn’t wanted it, and yet she’d taken it, encouraged it, demanded more.

Let him use her.

She’d been punishing herself. Through him. The truth Caleb hadn’t wanted to admit.

He knew she’d had a bad relationship with some Albanian gangster in the past and that she was still working through it. Maybe it had something to do with that, but it felt more personal than that.

“It’s not your fault,” Kelly added, evidently reading guilt on his expression. “It was my choice. I asked for it. How could you have known differently?”

He had known. Subconsciously. Instinctively. He had known, but he’d ignored it because his other urges had been so strong.

At this silent admission, Caleb sucked in an urgent breath and then reached down to grab another Coke, this one for himself. He took a long swallow, hoping it would settle his stomach.

Kelly kept huddling next to him, so small and fragile that he incongruously felt like a big, hulking, clumsy Neanderthal. “It’s not that big a deal, anyway,” she mumbled. “You didn’t hurt me or anything. I just wasn’t as into it as I’d expected.”

And suddenly Caleb was angry with her. For making him feel like this. For causing him to question himself. For shaking the sure foundations of his universe over the course of the last weeks. “You might have considered how it would make me feel to fuck you when you didn’t want it. I’m not in the habit of being with women who are unwilling.”

Kelly opened her mouth, as if she were going to immediately respond. Then she snapped it shut and sipped her Coke in silence for a few minutes.

When she finally did respond, it wasn’t at all what Caleb had expected. “Are you so sure about that?”

It took him a few moments to piece together her question with the last thing he’d said. But when he had, he bristled defensively. “Are you suggesting—”

“No,” Kelly interrupted, sounding more tired than anything else now. “I know you would never take someone without consent or anything. That’s not what I was implying. I just meant, are you so sure that you’re always with women who want to be with you?”

Caleb was nearly as offended by this remark as he’d been by her earlier one. “Every woman I’ve been with has come to me willingly.”

“I know,” Kelly acknowledged softly. “But have they really wanted you?”

Caleb had been about to argue some more, but something about her question struck him. It didn’t convince him, but it made an impact on him. He sat for a moment and thought about it.

Then Kelly continued, before he could work out a response, “Have you ever hired a prostitute?”

“Call girls,” Caleb said. “Yes. But that’s a business transaction, and those women received as much as they provided.”

Kelly’s voice was faint as she prompted, “And they…wanted to be with you?”

Caleb jerked away, a jolt of resentment shooting through his chest at what he took to be her implication. “Yes. I’m careful about the services I used. Every woman who was sent to me was there willingly and was justly compensated.”

“I believe you. Although I’m not sure you can be one hundred percent sure about the kinds of choices most women living in those situations have. But anyway, that’s not really my point. They fuck you for the money. Not because they want to be with you.”

This was undeniably true.

“And all those other women you fucked over the years,” Kelly continued, her voice almost gentle but somehow functioning as a weapon Caleb couldn’t avoid.

“What about them?” he asked thickly. “They were all willing. Most of them came on to me. You aren’t really going to suggest that women don’t have the ability to make a conscious, informed choice about whom they have sex with.”

“I’m not talking about choice,” she said, her trembling finally starting to ease. “Every woman chose to be with you. I’m talking about something else. And are you going to suggest that every single one of those women you fucked for the night and then paid off with some offensive, expensive trinket wanted that experience? And did they actually want you for you? And not for your wealth, your power, or something else you could give them?”

Caleb was shaking now too, with some sort of rising intensity—only he was shaking on the inside. His fingers were motionless and relaxed on the seat beside him. “If they were with me for other reasons, then they were trying to use me as much as I used them. I’m simply the one who succeeded. Besides, they all had a good time.”

“Did they?” Kelly asked blandly, the mildness in her voice almost merciless. “How do you know?”

He didn’t.

He didn’t know at all.

Most of the time he hadn’t even cared enough to wonder whether they’d really come or not.

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, suddenly sounding sad and almost ancient, “I’m not saying you’re to blame for it. All of those women chose to do what they chose to do. Just like all the men I was with before. I used to think…”

There was a pause. And Caleb found himself holding his breath until she finished her sentence.

“What?” he asked at last, when she never completed the thought.

She shook her head. “Nothing. I used to think sex could be simple—just something to do. I never really thought what might be going on with the other person.”

Caleb had always been exactly the same, rarely thinking about the human being on the other end of the encounter. The revelation hit him with more power than it should have.

Kelly went on, as if she were speaking to herself now. “I went a really long time without ever knowing what it was like.”

“What?”

“Having sex with someone who saw me as a person and not a body. And who I saw in the same way.”

Caleb let out his breath and took another swig of Coke as his belly clenched sickeningly.

She’d been talking about herself, but the words so clearly applied to him too.

Surely there had been someone—in all his years of fucking—who’d wanted to be with him for no underlying reasons. Who’d just wanted him…for him.

It was tragically implausible, but if there had been someone like that in his past, Caleb couldn’t recall her.

Until Kelly. Maybe Kelly. But she might not even really want him either. Not completely. There was so much more going on inside her that she wasn’t revealing to him.

Why had she fucked him just now when she hadn’t really wanted to?

“Anyway,” Kelly concluded, “I’m sorry I messed up our hot sex. I’m still trying to work through a lot of issues, I guess, so it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped.”

It hadn’t been good at all, except for the empty physical release.

As they rode back home in exhausted silence, Caleb realized something else that hit him just as jarringly.

Their fucking hadn’t been much different from most of what had passed for good sex in Caleb’s life, until Kelly had entered his world.

It just had never bothered him before.

–

They only said a few words during the remainder of the drive. And when they got to his house, Kelly went right to bed while Caleb went to his office to return a couple of calls.

When he got up to the bedroom a half hour later, he saw that Kelly was under the covers.

She hadn’t brushed her hair, and her dress was tossed on the floor beside her shoes.

He’d half expected her to take a shower before going to bed, and the fact that she hadn’t wanted to immediately wash off all evidence of Caleb’s body on hers relaxed something in his chest.

Maybe it had just been one of those things. Maybe it wasn’t something he needed to feel guilty about.

He did, though. And it was somehow all tied up in his mind with the guilt provoked by his conversation with Sean Moore.

He took off his clothes, dropping them on the floor next to her dress, and then crawled under the covers beside her.

“Are you all right?” he asked, scooting over toward her.

She turned to face him, and even in the dark room he could see that her eyes were slightly red.

She’d been crying.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, smiling faintly. “I’m glad you didn’t work all night.”

Caleb didn’t even register her comment. The small comfort he’d taken in the fact that she hadn’t showered had dissolved completely at the sight of her face.

He was overwhelmed with another sick, heavy feeling rising in his gut.

It wasn’t guilt so much now as knowledge.

There was so much going on inside Kelly that he didn’t know about. Her life was just as complex and conflicted as his was, and that meant everything she did might be more than what it initially appeared.

She could come on to him—fuck him like an animal—and not really want it. She could say yes with her mouth and body and say no with her heart. She was deep and haunted and torn and human. And human.

Like him.

He didn’t want her saying no to him—not any part of her. He wanted what was between them to be real.

“Kelly,” he murmured, unable to resist the instinct to pull her into his arms.

She didn’t pull away. Her shoulders shook a few times, and she burrowed against his side.

So Caleb held her, had to acknowledge that she was desperately wounded from more than one experience in her past, that he hadn’t really been thinking about what was best for her.

He could see himself—as if from a distance—as he’d been brutally pounding into her body from behind, even as he’d somehow known that she wasn’t in the mood, that there was more going on with her than he wanted to acknowledge.

He stroked the tangled, golden glory of her hair.

And he thought about what she might have been trying to hide this evening with sex.

–

Caleb held Kelly for an hour or so, trying to figure everything out.

He just didn’t seem to be capable of thinking clearly this evening. In any way.

He kept going back to the idea that Kelly had started coming on to him after the strange interaction with Wes, and the suspicious part of his nature wondered if she had been using it as a distraction, trying to hide something from him.

But he couldn’t figure out anything that had to do with Wes that she could possibly want to hide.

Finally, when he could feel she’d completely relaxed in his arms, he murmured, “So what happened earlier? Why did you get so upset?”

She tensed briefly but then relaxed again. “I don’t know.”

“You know something.”

After a long moment she finally said, “Do you ever think something is a good idea at first but then, once you start down that road, you realize it’s not what you want at all? But then it feels like it’s too late to take it back?”

Caleb knew she was talking about the sex they’d had earlier, but he suddenly saw himself all those years ago, thinking there was an easy way to deal with a business problem that threatened to ruin him and then realizing how utterly wrong it was but being in too deep to take it back. He said softly, “Yeah. I’ve been there.”