Goddamn, but he hated how hopeful his voice sounded.
Still, he braced himself for her to kick him out. To tell him that this had been a mistake, a onetime fling to scratch the itch…
She smiled, slow and intimate.
“Yeah. I want you to stay.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Jill was resting lazily on Vincent’s chest when her phone on the nightstand buzzed.
She reached for it, feeling both a flicker of guilt and amusement at the text message on her screen.
“Tom said he forgives you for almost breaking his nose.”
Vincent’s hand clamped around her wrist as he lifted the hand holding her cell phone up to his face. “Tell me you’re not texting your ex while you’re lying naked beside me.”
“Of course not,” she said, pressing her lips to his shoulder. Then she did it again, just because she could. “He’s texting me.”
Vincent made a growling noise and plucked the phone out of her hand, tossing it back on the nightstand before he rolled over her.
She ran her fingers over his shoulders, surprising herself with the greedy need to touch him. Jill wiggled beneath him suggestively, noting the unmistakable flare of heat in his eyes.
But instead of taking the hint, he stared… no, glared… down at her.
“Jill.”
She froze at the serious note in his voice, her hands falling back weakly to the bed. She had a pretty good idea what was coming, and even though it was a conversation that needed to happen, she was dreading it.
Still, his voice was gentle, and his gaze softened slightly as he looked down at her, so that helped.
Vincent propped his elbows on either side of her head. “Tell me.”
She brought her hands to rest on his forearms. “Tell you…”
He toyed with a strand of her hair. “What happened with Tom?”
Jill licked her lips. “It… it didn’t work out.”
“Obviously. But I need a bit more than that. I just slept with a woman who up until a few hours ago I thought was engaged. Hell, up until two weeks ago you were engaged.”
Jill slapped her hands over her eyes and groaned. “Oh my God. When you say it like that, I sound like such… such…”
“A hussy?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, even though his voice was teasing. “I feel icky. Like a man-eater who jumps from one man’s bed to the next. Although you should know, it had been awhile with—”
He laid a finger over her lips. “I don’t want to know. Not about that.”
“So what do you want to know?”
He looked down at her then, his expression hesitant and Jill had a pretty good idea why. Communicating with their bodies was one thing—gasps and moans and really good sex… well that was easy, in a way.
But this—the emotional stuff—was harder. Especially for a man like Vincent.
And not particularly easy for her either. She knew how people saw her. As an open, heart-on-her-sleeve kind of woman.
And she sort of was.
But that didn’t mean she wasn’t every bit as afraid of heartache as other people.
Throwing her love—if it had even been that—at Tom had been easy. He’d been open and wanting to receive it. And even had he rejected it, Jill supposed she’d always known on some level that getting rejected by Tom wouldn’t crush her.
She dropped her gaze to Vincent’s Adam’s apple.
Throwing something as powerful as love at Vincent…
That was risky. Scary.
She knew that he’d never intentionally hurt her, but that didn’t change the fact that Vincent Moretti was perhaps the only man on earth who could crush her.
Jill returned her eyes to his gaze, found him watching her.
“Why didn’t you tell me? When it ended… you could have…” He swallowed nervously. “It would have meant a lot to know.”
Jill’s heart squeezed at the admission, and guilt racked through her. “I was scared.”
He frowned. “About what?”
She took a deep breath, wondering how much to tell him. She started to look away, but his palm cupped her face. Brought it around to face him. “Jill.”
“There were two parts to it,” she said slowly. “The first was about me… I wanted to be damn sure that you weren’t just a rebound. I wanted time to think before, well… this. And the second was about you. I wasn’t… I wasn’t sure if you’d only wanted what you couldn’t have.”
His gaze darkened. “Explain.”
“I’ve been right in front of you for six years,” she said softly. “Right there, this whole damn time. But it wasn’t until after I got serious—really serious—about someone else that you seemed to want me back.”
He was silent for several moments, then dipped his head with a soft oath before he rolled off of her so they were lying on their backs, side-by-side.
Vincent lifted a hand to his face, his thumb and forefinger pinching the bridge of his nose tiredly. “Here’s the thing, Henley… if I tell you the truth… you’ll have no reason to believe me.”
“Try me,” she said, rolling onto her side and looking down at him.