Lahat ng Kabanata ng When Forbidden Feels This Good: Kabanata 81 - Kabanata 90

Scarlett’s POVHe responded to it the way he always responded to it, with the specific, targeted focus of someone who had catalogued every sound I made and understood precisely what produced each one and had absolutely no interest in moving past any of them before they had been fully explored.His mouth found the curve of my shoulder and stayed there long enough to make my back arch. Moved lower, tracing the line of my ribcage with a patience I had not asked for and could not have withstood much more of."Cade." His name came out as something between a request and a complaint."I'm not rushing." His voice was warm against my skin, unhurried, infuriatingly certain of itself. "We have all night.""I am aware that we have all night, but …"His mouth found a place that made the rest of the sentence entirely inaccessible.Whatever I had been about to say dissolved. Became something else, something wordless, something that arrived in the room as a sound that I immediately became aware of ma

Scarlett’s POVHe was standing approximately two feet away with a plate in one hand and an expression of mild, genuine amusement that I recognised from last night because it had been wearing that expression when I looked up from twelve inches away on the lobby floor and found it considerably more difficult to look away from than the situation technically warranted.In the morning light, he was, if anything, more affecting than he had been in the amber warmth of the lobby.The morning did specific things to people. Stripped away the curated quality of the evening, the considered choices of lighting and setting, and replaced them with something more direct, more honest. Some people did not survive the morning's editorial process. Ezra Cole survived it with what appeared to be complete indifference to the fact that it was happening.He was wearing a simple white Henley, the kind with three buttons at the collar, two of which were undone, and dark trousers that suggested he had somewhere

Scarlett’s POVMy mother's voice filled the hotel room for the fourth time.I had the volume low, the phone held close to my ear, her words arriving in that specific compressed quality of voice notes, slightly tinny, slightly too close to the microphone, the way people recorded voice notes when they were feeling something strongly enough that the technical considerations became secondary.PLEASE. Let me know how you are doing. I am worried.A breath. The sound of her collecting herself.Are you not seeing my calls?Another breath, shorter this time, the breath of someone moving from worried into something with a little more edge to it.You had better return them right now before I lose my mind and meet you in Houston.Then the shift, the one that always happened with my mother, the moment where whatever she was feeling gave way to the version of herself she most wanted to be, the one that led with love rather than fear.Look, baby, I'm sorry for yelling. James and I are just worried a

Scarlett’s POVHe was still looking at me.That was the thing about Cade in the aftermath of enormous news: he did not look away, did not find something else to occupy his eyes while his mind caught up with what had just been said. He looked directly at the thing, or in this case directly at me, the person who had delivered the thing, with the focused, unblinking attention of a man who had decided that whatever was in front of him deserved his complete and undivided presence.His expression was still doing that unguarded thing.Still stripped of management."What's wrong?" I asked because the silence had stretched past the point where I could sit comfortably inside it without knowing what was living there. "Are you okay?"He blinked."No.” A pause. "I mean, yes. "I'm fine." He ran a hand over his face, the gesture of someone returning to their body from somewhere slightly further away. "I am just processing what you told me."I watched him process.Watched the information continue to

Scarlett’s POVThe nap was the best thing that had happened to my body in weeks.Not the deep, scheduled sleep of someone who had gone to bed at a reasonable hour with a clear conscience and nothing pressing on the other side of wakefulness. The other kind, the kind that arrived unexpectedly in the middle of the afternoon in a warm room with good linen and the solid, steady warmth of another person beside you, was the sleep that came after something that had used up everything you had and left you pleasantly empty, light and loose and thoroughly unconcerned with the world beyond the immediate square footage of the bed.I was aware of Cade beside me, the slow rise and fall of his breathing, his arm a warm weight across my waist, the particular quality of a man deeply and genuinely asleep, and all the controlled tension of him finally released into something softer. I lay in the half-world between sleep and waking and listened to the hum of the air conditioning and the distant muffled s