Page 38 of Burden of Proof

“Do you want to be with me?” he asked, squeezing my hand.

I forced my fingers to unclench, turned my palms up toward him, and he threaded our fingers together.

“I don’t know you.”

“You know a bit,” he said. “I think.”

I knew as much about him as he knew about me, which wasn’t a lot but it was still something.

“Do you want to be with me?” he asked again.

“Do you want to be with me?”

Hunter frowned, shook his head. “Don’t do that. Don’t…don’t be scared of being honest just because it’s unknown territory.”

That was a punch to the chest, enough to cave my sternum in and stop my heart. I took my free hand and rubbed a circle over the invisible wound, realizing that he’d been holding my hand so long I had already gotten used to the way his fingers felt twined with mine. He shook me loose, but only to cover the hand on my chest with his. The barest amount of pressure, and his otherhand slid around my back and just like that, he pressed me back into my body, back into place.

“Yes,” I admitted to him. “I do.”

CHAPTER 12

HUNTER

It would be far too easy to fall in love with Lincoln, I realized. With one hand on his back and the other on his chest, his lungs expanding with every breath between my grip and his watery eyes blinking up at me with a desperation I could almost taste.

“What do you need right now?” I asked, sliding my hands up to his face so I could wipe the dampness from his cheeks. “I don’t know you well enough to know yet.”

Lincoln snorted, scrunching his nose. “And you say you don’t know how to do this.”

“I don’t.”

“When you pretend, don’t you feel it here?”

He pressed his hand against the middle of my chest, and I didn’t have any option besides to tell him the truth.

“When I’m with you, I do.”

“What does it feel like?”

I licked my lips, trying to make sense of the way I felt the first night with Lincoln when I’d put him on his knees. He wasn’t the first hookup, the first paying customer, the first man I’d dominated, and yet everything about him had been different. I had been different.

“Feels like the only thing I want to do is put you on your knees and keep you there. I don’t even care about fucking you. I mean, I want that, but…”

“You could put me on my knees,” he murmured.

I glanced at the empty glass on the table, the weary redness of his eyes.

“You’ve been drinking,” I reminded him.

“I’m not drunk,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I’m just tired.”

“Then let me take you to bed.”

He groaned, but when I pulled him to his feet, he didn’t argue. When I walked him to the bedroom, turning lights off along the way, he made no protest. And when we reached my bedroom, he made an amused sound in the back of his throat.

“I knew the other room was a guest room,” he said. “There’s no way you fuck strangers in your own bed.”

“I don’t fuck strangers in my apartment,” I corrected, plucking at the hem of his shirt before tugging it over his head and tossing it onto the floor.