I swallow hard. “Tell them—tell them I love them, and I’ll call in the morning, okay?”
Just as I’m about to abruptly end the call by flipping the phone shut, so I can go back to the high school angst playing out on screen before the TV decides to screw up again, Lucas says smoothly, “Wyatt’s worried, too.”
The instant I hear Wyatt McCrae’s name, I freeze. I haven’t seen him in months, since before I met and married Brad in a spur of the moment decision that had been fueled by a broken heart and too many shots of vodka, but the mere mention of him still shakes me to my core. Wyatt was my first everything.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I shake my head and remove my thumb from the phone’s power button. “God, Lucas,” I snap. Why does my brother have to be such a sneaky, traitorous ass? “You told him I left, huh?”
“He was with me when Brad called asking if I knew where you went. He was—” Lucas begins.
I don’t hear the rest because there’s a booming knock at my door. It’s rhythmic, and it takes me a second to realize that I know this beat. In fact, I know it well. It’s Chevelle’s “Send the Pain Below.” Only one person I know would be playing that song.
Dammit.
Eighteen months ago, in this same hotel, I had Chevelle playing on repeat when Wyatt McCrae had snuck into my room. I was still seventeen, but something had changed between Wyatt and me during that tour with their band. That night, he’d made love to me, slowly, hesitantly. Perfectly. The Chevelle CD was still spinning when he left early the next morning, well before the rest of the band woke up.
There’s another knock—the same Chevelle song—but this time, each beat makes my heart throb a little more erratically. A wave of nausea crashes into the pit of my stomach, and I rub my suddenly sweaty palms on the comforter beneath me.
“You there?” Lucas demands.
“Oh yeah,” I say, immediately interrupting whatever it is Lucas tries to say next. “And, apparently, you took the initiative to tell Wyatt which hotel he could find me at.”
My brother makes a frustrated noise. “Now, Kylie—”
But I ignore his explanations and all-around bull because I know it will do nothing but make matters worse at the moment.
“I’ll call you back.” I hang up on him before he has a chance to argue with me.
There’s no winning against my brother. There never has been, and I doubt there ever will be. Since he’s bound to call me back, I hold my thumb down on the End button until the phone powers off.
Outside my room, Wyatt knocks on my door again, just a touch more urgently than the last time.
My breath comes out in short, heavy bursts, but I will myself to calm down as I pad barefoot across the threadbare mud-brown carpet. I don’t have any other choice but to pull myself together. I fling the door open and drag my eyes up. Wyatt sags against the doorframe and exhales. That same magnetism that drew me to him over a year ago, making me tell and show him things about myself that now make me flush, is vibrating through my veins once again.
I take a hesitant step forward despite the fact I’m not wearing anything but a tank top and boy shorts.
Wyatt runs the palm of his hand over the top of his short dirty-blonde hair. “You divorced that motherfucker?” he asks in a low voice. He drags his hand down his face and shakes his head to each side before training his vivid blue eyes on me. “Please tell me Lucas wasn’t shitting me.”
Stepping aside, I silently let him in, pressing my back up against the wood paneled wall behind me. I slam the door shut once he’s inside my cramped room. Now that I’m facing him, I try to drop my gaze to the strip of carpet between us, but he tucks his finger under my chin, stopping me.
“Ky, did you really leave him?” he asks.
My hasty marriage had lasted a total of four months before Brad and I both realized how little we knew about each other—like how there was practically no love between the two of us. Wyatt stares me down expectantly, and I force out a hoarse laugh. When I grant him a begrudging nod, he lets his head fall back in relief, muttering a curse.
“Yeah, I left him,” I whisper. “Turns out he was just as toxic as you.”
Wyatt’s mouth drags down into a frown. On him, even something so sour is beautiful, and it nearly yanks my heart right out of my chest.
“Looks like I’m your toxic sequel then, huh?”
Your toxic sequel. For some messed-up reason, the description fits him to a T. “Looks like you are. What are you doing here, Wyatt?”
He takes my hands in his, massaging feather-soft circles on the backs of them with his thumbs as if the slightest touch might break me. It won’t, and I don’t miss how his eyes dip down to my wrists. Angrily, I jerk my arms away from him, crossing them over my chest.
That he would actually look makes my throat feel like it’s shrinking while my heart feels like a clamp is bearing down on it. Months ago, on the way to this very hotel, I told him that I would never cut myself again, and thoughts to do so haven’t crossed my mind since, not even when shit hit the fan with my ex.
“Now that you’ve seen for yourself that I can actually follow through on my promises, will you please get the hell out of my room?”
Wyatt groans, taking a step toward me. I move away from him until the backs of my legs hit the bed, but he places his hands firmly on the slope of my hips, wraps his arms around me, and clutches me to him.
“I never doubted you, Ky.”
“Don’t lie to me,” I say, my breath hitching on the word lie. “You can do anything else, but don’t lie to me.”
“Fine.” He bends slightly, so his mouth grazes my ear, and as he speaks, the piercing in his lip rubs against the tiny sterling hoop in my cartilage. “I came here because Lucas wants me to bring you back to Atlanta.” As he says this, his hands skim around to the front of my panties. “I came here because I know exactly why you left Brad in the first place.”
He starts to slide down my panties, but I close my hands around his wrists. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demand, my nostrils flaring. “I’m not sure if you remember, but I’m not one of your groupies. And it’s really cocky to assume I left my husband because of you. We haven’t spoken since before I got married, babe.”
“Far from a groupie.” A sexy smile crawls across his face. “I’d never tell any groupies that staying away from them has been hell. I’d never tell them that I’m not leaving, no matter how much they order me to—I wouldn’t give a fuck about what they thought. But with you, Ky ... well, you know how that goes.”
He dips his head, bringing his lips close enough to my face for me to feel his warm breath against the corner of my mouth. I suck in a gasp of air through my nose, but he stops me before I can release it, crushing his lips against mine. Even though the kiss is short, it’s anything but sweet. It’s possessive and rough. Hungry and painful and even a little mind-altering.
But it sure as hell isn’t sweet.
Wyatt pulls back, his chest rising and falling heavily. “As for you and Brad, don’t try to pull that bullshit on me, beautiful. We could go years without saying a word, and we’d still manage to fuck with each other’s head. So, no, I’m not leaving you.”
“What if I make you?” I ask, despite how the pit of my stomach curls into a mass of knots and tangles. God, it hurts. I let go of his wrists and move my hand up to trace my fingertips along his square jawline, shivering at the contrast between his faint stubble and my soft skin. “What if I don’t want you here?”
“None of that what-if shit, Ky,” he says roughly, pushing me back onto the bed.
As I slide backward toward the pillows, he follows, opening my legs in the process.
“If you wanted me gone, you wouldn’t have let me in. You knew it was me before you even opened that door.”
By the time the back of my head bangs up against the faded headboard, my heart is beating as erratically as it did that first night with him. He stops in front of me, his muscular body positioned between my thighs.