I SENT IT. I SENT THE address for Rose’s rehabilitation center to Rick. And afterward, I felt like a big fucking coward. It wasn’t anyone’s business where Rose was, especially his. Would it even be enough to make the nude picture of me disappear from Janice’s desk?

Soon my phone vibrated with another text from Rick. A picture of Janice’s desk, emptied, along with the words Good girl. Talk soon.

It didn’t make me feel any better about myself, and it sure as fuck made me hate Rick even more. Good girl. That made me want to throat punch him, and I didn’t have a violent bone in my body. Maybe the address was enough for now, but there were plenty of senators with family problems. I had a feeling he would be back for more fuel to add to the fire.

To drown my self-loathing, I made sure we played about a thousand more rounds of Charlotte’s drinking game, while the back of my mind spun a wobbly circle around what to do next. I could call Her Number, beg her parents to have a paternity test performed, and then drag Rick’s career down with mine. But that wouldn’t solve anything. Not yet anyway, but I was too drunk for any more rational braining tonight.

I came home feeling like my back teeth were floating and swayed up the steps through the quiet, dark house with a finger pressed to my lips as a reminder to not fall down and go boom.

Riley’s car was gone but Sam’s wasn’t, so he was probably asleep. The thought of him sleeping magnetized me toward his closed door. What did he look like while he slept? What if he wasn’t sleeping?

We had the entire house to ourselves. To talk. To apologize for my text to Rick about Rose’s whereabouts. Through a closed door. Like adults. While one of them was drunk off my ass. Yep, this plan had zero holes in it.

Oh, who was I kidding? My entire body buzzed with possibilities, which made it difficult to form a fist with a shaking hand. I rapped on the door softly.

He was probably asleep. Maybe I should go back to my room and play with Slave. Maybe I should knock a little harder.

Still no answer.

I could talk to him tomorrow. That way, I wouldn’t disturb him. I would just have to redirect the guilt I felt over becoming a traitorous spy, crumple it up into a more manageable size, and toss it on top of the mountainous pile of shame called the rest of my life. I’d learned to forget before; I could do it again.

Yet standing outside his door in an otherwise empty house excited me so much, it nearly buckled my knees with want. The ache between my legs drew me even closer to his door. My face grew hotter as I lifted a hand to the doorknob.

Just a peek to see if he was okay. As I pushed inward, slivers of moonlight angled across my knuckles from the window. A man with a bow and arrow I recognized from Sam’s zombie show squinted from a poster above the dresser in the corner, judging me, or maybe urging me on. Jeans and T-shirts lay in heaps all over the floor. A fan spun lazily overhead, pushing his leather and oak scent all around the room. He lay on his bed in the dark with only a thin sheet covering his lower half. His chest, carved with muscle and shadows, rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

I stood there staring, my lips pushed together to hold back a moan. Even sleep looked good on him. I should’ve left instead of ogling him like some kind of voyeur, but he was too gorgeous to look away from. My fingers twitched to touch him, to slide my hands down that beautiful body, to taste him. To make him come. To make me forget my betrayal.

A flush bloomed across my skin, and my breaths became pants. I gripped the doorknob tighter to keep myself upright. My blood sizzled with a kind of longing I’d never felt before. There was no turning back, not even if I tried.

Every step inside his bedroom charged the air with an electrical intensity that peppered my arms with goose bumps despite the heat. Just a taste, a way to make what I’d done up to him. Wow, was I the master of talking myself into something, or what?

I stopped at the foot of his bed while struggling to contain my nervous breaths. His full lips turned down at the corners in a frown, and I licked my own at the thought of his mouth all over me. They had been all over me. Devouring and claiming me like no one else had.

The memory ignited my body once again. My hips rocked forward into the wooden post of the footboard, and I grasped it to keep from flipping over onto the bed like some crazy person.

God, what was wrong with me? I’d been sloppy drunk before, but was it normal to be so goddamned horny? Or was I under some kind of sexual spell Sam had concocted?

Just a taste. Just until he comes.

With slick hands, I reached for the sheet covering the lower half of his body. The sheet slid down, down, revealing a very naked, and a very hard, Sam Cleary.

I swallowed at the sight of his impressive length, at the way the moonlight glinted off the patch of blond curls, the long, lean columns of his legs. The man was gorgeous.

I didn’t need him. But fuck if I didn’t want him.

Slowly, carefully, I hoisted a leg over the footboard and hoped the mattress didn’t squeak under the press of my knee. I followed with my other leg and waited with breath held for any sign of movement from him. If he woke up now, I had no idea what I would do. Bend over and start sucking? No, I wanted to wake him gradually, make him think he was still dreaming, then when he realized he wasn’t, I wanted to see that realization dawn all over his face, just like the smiles he reserved for me.

Forearms posted on either side of his hips, I breathed in his musky, soapy smell. What would he feel like inside me? It would be so easy to slide up his body so I lay flush with his and guide him into me.

No. Just this and nothing else. An apology for the destruction of his family. That was all.

I kissed his tip with my breath held, waiting for him to stir. When he didn’t, I flicked out my tongue and licked halfway up his long shaft.

His mouth fell open in a soft gasp, and his eyelids fluttered.

I had never done this before, but I’d read about it plenty. Lisa Montgomery never skimped on the sex details, and that had to count for something. I slipped his tip inside my mouth and brushed my fingers up the velvety length of him to make a fist.

His stomach muscles contracted. He heaved a groan that reverberated all the way to my tongue.

Slowly at first, I began to stroke him as I took him deeper into my mouth.

Both his hands gripped the sheet underneath him and twisted, his eyes still closed in sleep or bliss or both.

I sped my rhythm, and with each flick of my tongue, my hips thrust the air, my body craving its own release.

“Paige,” Sam moaned, his whole body twitching, the cords in his neck straining.

Hearing him say my name in such a state of passion made me grin around him. I swirled my tongue over his tip while my hand continued to work him, and then I whispered, “Yes, Sam. It’s me.”

His eyes popped open, and his steady, moonlit gaze heated my insides to jelly. Caught in the act without the illusion of a dream, but I didn’t hear any complaints. Keeping my eyes locked on his, I took him into my mouth again and slid my other hand inside my soaked panties.

“Oh, my fucking god,” he breathed.

I moaned around him as I glided two fingers inside myself and grinded against the palm of my hand. I was so, so wet for him, for what I was doing to him.

The muscles in his hard body jumped to keep up with my mouth’s pace. His gasps punctuated my moans. His hands skimmed to the back of my head, not to guide me, it seemed, but to brush stray hairs away from my face so he could look at me as I sucked him.

With him now fully awake, this felt real. It wasn’t a dream, though it did feel like an out-of-body experience. It unnerved me, scared me even, but the uncertainty of what this meant, what it could change between us, turned me on even more.

After all, he was the one who wanted to get personal.

My tongue followed a glistening trail up toward my fist as the tightly constructed seams in my perfectly crafted life began to come apart. Slowly at first, and then faster and faster, until my whole body burst into transformed pieces. I cried out and let my orgasm pulse down to my curled toes.

Once I stumbled back into this new reality, I met Sam’s fiery stare, the sound of his rough breaths coupling with the rush of blood between my ears.

“Holy fuck,” he rumbled. Then he gently guided me back to his unfinished business with a quick slide of his tongue across his lower lip.

I took as much of him as I could and pumped him with renewed vigor. His head smacked the pillow again, and with each thrust of my mouth, his hips rocked upward toward my face. The fists at the back of my head wound around my hair tighter and pulled until it was almost painful, but not quite. Then, with a growly moan, he filled my mouth with warmth and salt and a masculine flavor that was all his.

Delicious. Every inch of him. And I was a fool to think that one taste would be enough.

I continued to stroke him gently, pressing kisses to his thighs, his hips, the happy trail climbing up his stone-carved abs, while his orgasm finished shuddering through him. Maybe it was the alcohol still thrumming through my veins, but I didn’t want to end this, whatever this was exactly. I wanted more, and more meant all of him for the rest of the night and into infinity.

Every time I was with him, he made me feel like a treasure. He was a beautiful distraction, but if he knew the truth, all of it including what I did tonight, he would likely kick me out of his bed.

I sat up, wiped my mouth, and leveled him with a casual look I hoped said Well, it’s been fun, even though it had been so much more. But the smoldering blaze in his eyes tripped me up in my haste to clamber off him. Luckily, I caught myself before I toppled onto the floor. But my lack of grace couldn’t sever the lock between our gazes, because underneath his lustful burn, tenderness sparked there, too.

“You’re welcome to come back and do that again anytime,” he said.

“I’m drunk,” I said as if that would explain everything and somehow shine a better light on me.

“Remind me to get more alcohol,” he said, smiling.

I shook my head, my cheeks flaming, the room suddenly spinning. What must he think of me? That I was a lush who slinked into guys’ bedrooms late at night looking for some action? That was actually closer to the truth than I cared to admit.

“This was a mistake,” I said and hoped my harsh tone conveyed I really meant it. If only I’d realized that before I’d climbed on top of him. Before I drank him further into my very existence.

Before I could flee the room and slam the door on what I’d done, he grabbed my hand.

“Was it?” He sucked two of my fingers into his mouth, the same two fingers I’d used to get myself off.

His sinful tongue stroked them, and the drag of those full lips over my knuckles shuddered fevered memories throughout my body at what else he could do with that mouth. He eased my fingers out, and the slow slide of his lips over my flesh ignited my center once again.

“It doesn’t taste like a mistake to me.” He sat up at the same time he pulled me down to sit next to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said without looking at him. “I took advantage of you, and...I’m sorry.”

It seemed I was developing a pattern of sneaking into men’s bedrooms at night. Since Rick was physically scarred while in the line of duty, dangerous, rugged, and unconditionally forbidden due to our nine-year age gap, my whole sixteen-year-old world began to revolve around him while he stayed with us during his summer internship. He knew Dad from a high school aerospace engineering work study program, and Dad thought he could get him a job before Max Cleary wooed Rick into becoming a senator. While Rick stayed with us, I welcomed his lustful stares, awoke gasping every morning with thoughts of his hands on my skin, until things spiraled out of control between us. That was before I realized what he really was—cold, heartless, and married.

I’d wanted to blame my sexual curiosity on a hormonal imbalance, but my doctor, and later Dr. Morrison in college, had confirmed everything was normal. Then why weren’t all sixteen-year-olds climbing into bed with older men and later popping out babies? Inside my barely existent social circle in Wichita, it was just me.

Maybe Dad had been right—maybe I was wicked.

Sam scooted forward to brush his fingers across the back of my neck and gently turned my face into his palm. “Don’t be sorry.”

The backs of my eyes burned, and I quickly looked away. What kind of kick to the self-esteem would it be to be given a blow job, then have the girl cry all over the place like a blubbering idiot from guilt?

His fingers skimmed slow and gentle toward my chin and turned me once again to face him. “How much did you have to drink tonight?”

I shook my head, and the room tipped. My stomach bubbled with nausea. I couldn’t even begin to count how many glasses of wine I’d had.

Something so sad and haunted rolled across his face with a wince that it broke my heart all over again. He scrubbed a hand down his face then searched the floor for a pair of boxers.

“Come on,” he said, hauling me to my feet. “You need to sleep it off.”

He ushered me in front of him toward my room, safely tucked away in his boxers. He turned the light on and folded back the blankets on my bed for me.

Since I’d gone to the cowboy bar dressed for bed, I crawled in and burrowed under the covers as if to disappear. I didn’t deserve his compassion, but it flooded me with a warmth more intense than alcohol and sex combined.

When I was settled, he slid the glasses from my nose and set them on top of the nightstand. Then he brought me a trashcan from the bathroom and said, “Sleep on your side.”

I nodded and assumed the position, but a bounce on the bed clued me in that I wasn’t alone. He was climbing under the covers with me.

Under my wide-eyed stare, he paused. “I just want to make sure you don’t die. Just sleeping, okay?”

“Yeah.”

His nearness and the sound of his voice sank my eyes closed with a shiver. He was such a good, sweet person, so unlike Rick in every way, and the more I got to know him, the clearer that became. I wasn’t so sure I deserved someone like him, but if I let it, it could be too easy to let my heart get as carried away as my body and fall in love with him.

What a terrifying, exhilarating experience that would be.