TommasoI stared down at Paige, the freezing wind this high up on the tower rushing in my ears. My heart thundered. Did I hear her wrong? She loathed me, or owed me? She couldn’t have possibly said that she loved me. Not after she called me a good dude. Not after everything. I smiled and barely resisted the urge to ask her to repeat herself.Her eyes widened. “Um, aren’t you going to say something?”I chuckled a little awkwardly. “Would you believe that I don’t know what to say?”“I just told you I loved you.” She swallowed. “You can’t think of anything to do but stare at me?”This time, I knew I’d heard her correctly. The crowd on the platform, the wind, the cold, everything dropped away. She loved me. My chest lightened until I was certain I could’ve walked right off the edge of the tower and continued walking—dancing over Paris itself until the words stopped ringing in my ears. She loved me!I laughed with sheer, overwhelmed delight, and when she frowned up at me, I cleared my thro
PaigeI nuzzled into Tom’s chest, inhaling cinnamon to keep me grounded in yet another strange bed. He was so warm, so steady. Part of me thought I could sleep anywhere with my head on his chest. And his arm around me didn’t hurt either. My sweatshirt had rucked up a little, exposing a thin sliver of skin, and his pinkie finger rested against it. After the night we’d had, the way he looked at me, I couldn’t pull my mind away from that sliver. My pulse beat in the skin there.Slowly, half-believing I was actually doing this, I twisted under the sheets to push my sweatshirt up further and expose more of myself. Tom’s hand moved automatically to cover the new skin. His pinkie now stopped just below my breast, reminding me I’d decided to go to bed without a bra for the first time since my escape. I glanced up at him and found his eyes closed. Could he really be asleep? His massive hand burned into my ribcage and down between my thighs. I ached.Fuck it.“Tom,” I whispered.He blinked slow
PaigeI pressed my lips to Tom’s with all the fire of the dream I’d just left. Want ached between my legs. After a moment, he began kissing me back, moving in time with my mouth, but his hands sat dead at his sides, where they’d been since I’d woken up. The part of me that had burned into desire wanted to lean back and scream at him. Why wouldn’t he touch me? Didn’t he want me? In the dream—dreams, if I was being honest—Tom wasn’t afraid as soon as I made it clear I wanted him. And I very, very much did.Against my hip, through the blankets, I felt him start to harden. He wanted me. I knew he wanted me.“You can touch me,” I whispered.I expected him to move like I’d flipped a switch, but slowly, gently, he ran one hand up my side. Over my sweatshirt. I closed my eyes and dropped my mouth back to his to try to kiss him into action.In the dark, his hand belonged to someone else. The room transformed. I was somewhere small, and dark, and strange, and my body ached.I blinked and pulled
TommasoOn shaky legs, I stepped off the plane back in London. Killian’s new captain, Amelia, was good, but I’d never get used to that.“Need a few hours to refuel,” Amelia said. “Could be off as early as noon?”I laughed. “Why don’t we call it three? I need a second to catch my breath, and we need to pack up.”Paige squeezed my hand. “Three sounds good.”I smiled down at her, and we piled into yet another hired car to take us back to the hotel. She sat near me on the bench seat, just close enough that I couldn’t help thinking about the way she attached herself to me in the bed in Paris, the undulating rhythm of her hips against me as she slept. Anything I imagined after I caught her that night in Philly had been a pale imitation of the real thing. I’d been playing those high whimpers of hers, the soft gasp of my name, and the way she grabbed tighter, every day since.And I might have to keep doing just that for the rest of my days. Despite the fact that she’d kissed me, she’d frozen
PaigeA few hours into our flight, the sun had long since set, and stars shone off puffy clouds. I took a deep breath. I’d done it. I’d gone somewhere other than Tom’s house and therapy. I’d seen McKenna. Maybe we could be friends on the outside someday, when she stopped talking about everything like that, but for now, I knew we’d be a little distant. And I’d realized I loved Tom, told him at the top of the Eiffel Tower and everything. I hadn’t even been to therapy in three days, my longest break since my first session. Things were starting to feel…finished. “What will we do when we get home?” I asked quietly.Tom stirred from paging through a book while his eyelids drooped and yawned. “Unpack?”I laughed. “I mean, we got McKenna out. We made sure she’s actually okay and not some elaborate hologram that Edward concocted. What’s the next step in our long-term plan?”“We”s and “our”s had started building up in my sentences since I’d told Tom I loved him. Since he’d promised he wouldn’t
TommasoPaige and I arrived home in the dead of night, dropped into our separate beds, and struggled through jetlag until my phone vibrated, informing me I’d made the dumbass call to schedule a meeting to talk about Tony for the day after we returned. Silently, I held up the notification to Paige on a stool next to me at the breakfast bar.“So, you have to go?” She poked at her waffles.“So, we both do.” I stood with a groan. “It’s about Tony.”“Oh.” She brightened a little and followed me to my office.I struggled to swallow my yawns as my guys filed in and took their seats. Lyle, Stan, Teddy, and Carp, the men who were quickly becoming my inner circle.“So.” I tried to hide a stretch. “Tony. What do we have? I want to move fast.”“My mole finally got an in,” Stan said. “The long and short of it is that Tony’s middle management. He doesn’t procure; he doesn’t receive. Other people’s shipments just go through him.”“And I don’t know all of where they’re going, but somebody had heard h
PaigeI added the third image to the shared folder Lyle sent me and stretched. The AI software was advanced, but it took a lot of human involvement to actually produce something that wouldn’t throw up every red flag in the book. In some ways, I appreciated that for the job security it leant me. In others…I generated a new face—dark haired, this time, and dark-eyed—and the woman in the picture stared back at me placidly. Just the same as the first three. Too healthy. Not scared enough. I opened up my photo editor and exported the image. I looked away to grab my stylus, and when I looked back, Katie’s dark eyes loomed out of the page.Okay. I could start with the cheeks. I zoomed in on a patch of strangely lighted skin and began editing. When I blinked, the skin became mine, gaunt and pallid. I stared at the curl of dark hair at the edge of the frame until the certainty I would see my own face when I zoomed out melted away. These were fictional pictures, fictional women.I thinned out
TommasoBetween bursts of planning Tony’s demise, I wandered up to Paige’s room. No particular reason, except that after our trip to London, having her out of arm’s reach made me a little uneasy. Her door was slightly cracked when I walked up to it, and I peeked in.She had pulled her hair up into a messy bun and tucked one knee into her chest, yet another of the oversized sweaters she favored pushed up to her elbows. Her tablet sat on her lap, and she glanced between it and the screen in front of her, displaying a bold, modern logo. Her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth.My heart thudded unevenly. She was so goddamn beautiful.She started to turn, and I danced back out of the door. I didn’t want to distract her, make her lose her train of thought. Through the open door, I heard her sigh. I could almost imagine her shaking her head and returning to her work. I began heading back down to my office.Paige was beautiful, but if she was only beautiful, I would’ve been satisfied