Page 151 of Sinful Like Us

I shake my head. “I didn’t know.”

Don’t stare below her neck. Don’t look at her like that.I narrow my eyes on the window, and I revisit our first encounter at the Hale house. How she was frazzled but poised, how she tried to capture and harness her black cat. Did I think that someone like me—poor Italian-American trash, too serious, too stern, fresh out of war—would interest an American princess?

No.

Before I start reevaluating our first encounter, I remind myself that she wasseventeen.For fuck’s sake.

“You helped me with my cat,” she says like a fact, cheeks beet-red as I look back down at her.

“I did,” I say. “She’s a cute cat.”

Jane can’t holster a smile.

I ask straight out, “I fascinated you from the beginning?”

She nods. “You very much did.”

This is when I’d pick her up and carry her towards heaven, but we’re still living inside my hell. Where I can’t touch the woman I love.

Charlie drills his eyes into me. “It’s your turn.”

I tell her the answer. “I don’t believe in love at first sight either.” But I also can’t imagine a time where I wouldn’t love Jane.

Her brows crinkle. “Why not?”

“I can’t love someone until I know them. Attraction—that’s not love.”

She smiles. “I concur.”

I stop short from adding more. I might if her brother weren’t here. I’d say how attraction is just my cock wanting pussy. It’s my hands wanting her body. It’s my ears wanting her voice and to be drowned out by her. It’s lust.

Love is more.

It’s the days I wake up, feeling a need, an urgency to protect her. Not just her body but her spirit—her entire soul. It’s the days I imagine losing her, and I’m met with a bottomless empty, nothing there but hollow numbness.

Worse than death.

It’s the days I yearn for her laugh, for her companionship, and thoughts. It’s every day she makes me feel worthy of her and this life. All of it and more.

Charlie rubs at the edges of his eyes, almost irritably. “Pick another.”

“We can break,” Jane suggests for him.

“No.” He points at the deck.

She draws a card and passes it to me. I glance at the words.

Fuck.

No.

My jaw hardens.

“It’s that bad?” Jane wonders.

I rake a hand over my mouth before reading, “‘Tell us if you’ve seen a Rose Calloway and Connor Cobalt sex tape.’” I solidify.

Worry cinches my girlfriend’s eyes.