Page 37 of A Game of Deception

She shifted, turning onto her side to face me. Her hand reached out, fingers tracing the network of scars on my shoulder—the same ones she’d touched in the therapy room, but this time, there was no power play in the gesture. Just curiosity, and something softer I couldn’t name.

“How did you get these?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, the memory washing over me. “You know. Glass from the windshield,” I said, the words sticking in my throat.

Her fingers stilled for a moment, then resumed their gentle exploration. “Jimmy’s crash.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

She was quiet for a long time, her touch a balm against the old wound. “I never stopped thinking about you,” she finally said, her voice so low I almost didn’t hear it. “All these years. Even when I hated you for leaving, I couldn’t stop.”

The admission cracked something open inside me, something I’d kept carefully sealed. “I never stopped thinking about you either,” I confessed, the words raw and honest in the darkness. “Not for a single day.”

She looked up at me, her eyes wide and vulnerable in a way I’d never seen before. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of the sixteen-year-old girl who’d looked at me across her brother’s casket, her heart in her eyes. The one I’d almost kissed behind the church, in a moment of shared grief and connection that had haunted me ever since.

But then the moment passed. She sat up, the sheet falling away. “I should go.”

I didn’t stop her. We both knew this couldn’t last, couldn’t continue. Not with who we were, not with our history, not with Hank Swanson standing between us like a specter.

I watched as she gathered her clothes, slipping back into the red dress. She didn’t look at me as she zipped it up, as she ran her fingers through her tangled hair, as she checked her reflection in the mirror above my dresser.

Only when she was fully dressed, standing at the foot of my bed like a stranger, did she meet my eyes again. “This can’t happen again,” she said, but there was a question in her voice, a hesitation that belied her words.

I sat up. “Can’t it?”

She shook her head, but it seemed more like she was arguing with herself than with me. “It’s too complicated. Too dangerous. For both of us.”

“I’m not afraid of dangerous,” I said, holding her gaze. “I’m not afraid of complicated.”

“I have to go,” she repeated, more firmly this time. “It’s almost dawn.”

I nodded, accepting the inevitable. But as she turned to leave, I called after her. “So what happens now, Dr. Swanson?”

She paused in the doorway and looked back at me with an expression that mirrored all the confusion and longing I felt. “I have no idea,” she admitted, and then she was gone.

I fell back against the pillows, my body satisfied but my mind racing. The sheets still smelled like her—her perfume, her sweat and sex. I closed my eyes, trying to hold on to the memory of her touch, her taste, the sound of her voice when she’d said my name.

Whatever came next, whether punishment from Hank, awkwardness at the facility, or the inevitable fallout from crossing this line, I’d face it. For the first time in a very long time, I felt something other than guilt and self-loathing.

I felt alive.

10

TARA

I woke with a jolt,my body tensing before I even opened my eyes.

I’d slipped out of Xander McCrae’s penthouse just before dawn, my body still humming with the aftershocks.

“Fuck,” I whispered, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes until stars burst behind my eyelids.

Sunlight streamed through the gaps in my blinds, painting bright stripes across my pristine white duvet. My bedroom looked exactly as it always did—minimalist, organized, controlled. Everything in its place. Nothing to betray the fact that less than eight hours ago, I had stood outside Xander’s door, heart hammering in my chest, and told him?—

“Let’s fuck.”

Oh god.

I cringed so hard my entire body curled in on itself. Had those words actually come out of my mouth? Had I really shown up athis door in the middle of the night and propositioned him like some desperate groupie?