He’d been lying beside her, but she slid her leg over his hip, pulling him between her legs. His lips pulled away from her mouth as he shifted on top of her, his kisses trailing along her jaw down to the soft flesh of her neck. One of his hands slid underneath her shirt, cupping her breast, and a small moan escaped her lips.
That sound seemed to snap something awake inside Daniel because he abruptly stopped kissing her and pulled away from her. He moved his arms to either side of her, so he was holding himself up, hovering above her.
“Sorry,” Daniel said between gasps of air. “I don’t want to do something in the heat of the moment that we’ll regret later.”
“No, don’t be sorry.” She laughed a little, but he didn’t. Instead, he rolled away from her and lay on his back on the bed next to her. “I was having fun. We … we didn’t need to stop. At least not yet.”
“No, we do,” Daniel said, his voice low and husky. “It’s taking all my discipline to hold back now, and I’m not sure how much longer it will last.”
She rolled up on one elbow, looking down at him in the darkness. “Then maybe we shouldn’t hold back. I think that no matter when I’m with you, as long as I’m with you, it will be amazing.”
“Harper,” Daniel said at length. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
She leaned down toward him, and just before her lips pressed against his, she softly asked, “What?”
What began as a soft kiss grew deeper and more heated, silencing any of his protests, and that’s precisely why she’d kissed him. Harper didn’t want to hear arguments about regret, not when all she really wanted to do was be with him.
His hand cradled the back of her head, and the other gripped her hip possessively, adding more flame to the fire he’d started inside her. Then, abruptly, he tensed and pulled away again.
“What?” Harper asked, and she didn’t keep the hurt from her voice. “Am I doing something wrong?”
“Just the opposite,” he assured her quickly. “But…” He looked up at her, and even in the dark, she could feel his eyes searching her.
“I think we should wait until things are … better. Until we get this stuff with Gemma and Thea and Penn”—he said the last name with disgust—“straightened out. Okay?”
“Yeah,” Harper said. “Absolutely.”
He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close to him. She rested her head on his chest, and it wasn’t long before she fell asleep. And though she couldn’t explain, she was certain that Daniel stayed awake for a long time after she had.
SEVENTEEN
Festivities
The glass front window of the Capri Public Library was plastered with flyers. Most of them were for the various summer reading programs, and there were a few newer ones, on bright orange paper, advertising the upcoming fall programs.
Gemma had just been glancing at them as she walked up to the door, but between the papers, she saw her own eye staring back at her. She quickly peeled back the pages in front of it so she could get to her flyer, buried at the bottom and attached to the window with duct tape.
It was from when she’d run off with the sirens back in June, and Alex had made flyers and hung them up all over town. The large black-and-white picture of her face had begun to fade, but the “HAVE YOU SEEN ME?” typed in block letters across the top was clear.
She balled it up in her hand, preferring not to remember the time she’d spent away from Capri. It seemed like a lifetime ago, a dark blur, when she’d been isolated from the people she’d loved, fighting hungers she couldn’t control, and two men had ended up dead.
Instead of dwelling on it, she looked back at the window and realized that many of the flyers were outdated. She found one advertising the Founder’s Day Picnic, and that had been two and a half months ago. She pulled it down, along with the other older flyers, and carried them into the library.
“What did you do?” Marcy asked. She sat behind the front desk and held a hand up in front of her eyes, blocking the sun. “You’re letting all the light in.”
“Are you some kind of vampire now?” Gemma asked as she walked over to the desk.
Marcy scoffed. “Like I could ever drink blood. Gross.”
Children laughed loudly behind her, and Gemma glanced back over her shoulder to see the librarian, Edie, reading a story to a group of toddlers. That had always been Harper’s favorite part of working at the library, and seeing someone else doing her sister’s job made Gemma miss her.
Not just because Harper didn’t live at home anymore since Gemma had just seen her the night before. It was more like nostalgia. The life she’d had before, the one where she was just a swimmer, and her sister just worked at the library, that was over, and it was never coming back.
“I cleared off some of the older flyers for you.” Gemma turned back to Marcy and set the stack of faded and wrinkled papers down in front of her.
“Yeah, that was supposed to be my job,” Marcy said, and adjusted her thick-rimmed glasses.