“Banner.”

Oh, God. Please not now.

“Ban, I know you’re in here.” Jared’s voice is getting closer. I hear him opening stalls, searching for me. It’s only a matter of time. Soon I’ll see his feet in the space under the door. As best I can, I stuff the tears back into that black hole bottle and pull myself up, braced for the battle I never seem to stop fighting. The battle to resist Jared Foster. When he flings the door open, I’m ready.

“This is the ladies’ room,” I say, glaring at him, clinging to the image of Cindy 2.0 on his arm. “I can’t believe you followed me in here.”

“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t.” He locks the stall door, stalking toward me in the space shrinking with every inch he closes between us.

“You can’t be here.” I fold my arms under my breasts, conscious of how my cleavage is on display. His eyes drop to my chest, the glacial blue heating, wanting.

Hell no.

“I am here,” he replies with a calm I know to be false. A muscle ticks in his jaw. His hands are knotted into fists in his well-tailored pants. “And you will talk to me.”

“Go talk to your date,” I snap, turning away from him, facing the diaper changing station.

He grabs my arm and wrenches me around.

“No, you don’t get to do that,” he says, rage burning like a gas light in his eyes. “Not when I just had to sit through the league’s patron saint telling the whole world he loves you. Had to watch him claim you in front of everyone and couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

“Jared—”

“Haven’t been able to do anything about it for months.”

“Haven’t fucked for months, don’t you mean?” I fire back, jerking my arm from his grasp. “Isn’t that what she’s about? Your new Cindy? I said I didn’t expect you to wait, but you could have at least told me so I didn’t have to find out this way.”

“Find out what exactly?” His voice drops to subzero and his expression is the face of a cliff. “That I’m signing a Swedish soccer player who wanted to attend the awards tonight? Is that what I was supposed to tell you?”

My righteous indignation sputters, shrivels.

“What?” I ask dazedly, wondering if I’ve gotten it all wrong or if he’s just that convincing.

“As for fucking,” he grits out. “I haven’t slept with another woman. Haven’t wanted anyone else since you came back into my life. I haven’t kissed anyone else. Can you say the same? ’Cause you tasted like him last time I saw you.”

“I told you—”

“You haven’t told me shit, Banner.” With one impatient hand, he disrupts the neatness of his hair and paces in the small stall. “Except that you had to do this, and I couldn’t see you, and he was more important.”

“He was fighting for his life, Jared.”

“I get that, but he used it to keep you close, to keep you away from me, and I resent him for it. He was playing his own game. He knew it was me all along. He told me so when I was there.”

“I realized that tonight. Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugs, discomfort twisting his expression.

“He said it would distress you, only make it harder, and I believed him. I knew you wouldn’t leave him while he still needed you, and I agreed that it would only create more tension.”

He cups my face between his hands, his eyes losing some of the ice, warming with affection, with passion.

“I should have told you,” he says softly. “I wanted him to know from the beginning anyway.”

I nod, leaning into the warm strength of his hands.

“I’ve always known how to play the game, Ban. Always calculated what every move would yield and how I would come out the winner.” He shakes his head, helplessness foreign on his face. “But I didn’t know how to do this, how to handle wanting you for so long and then losing you again to someone we both know deserves you more than I do.”

And his words, so untrue, crystallize the truth for me.

We are a match, an unlikely perfect pair.

Neither of us fully seeing our worth. Not fully comprehending that our hearts were stitched together from the beginning with threads invisible to everyone else. With bonds that didn’t make sense to anyone but us—and sometimes not even to ourselves. Me thinking he deserved someone with a better outside, and him thinking I deserved someone with a better inside. When all along we deserved each other. And in that instant my heart puts words to this feeling that’s been growing and evolving and persisting ever since I saw the most beautiful boy on campus at freshman orientation. My heart articulates something I’ve been afraid of because I thought he couldn’t ever possibly fully reciprocate.

I love him.

Not in spite of his flaws. Not because he’s handsome. Not even though he is a ruthless bastard. I just love him, exactly as he is. If he never changes. If he never sees things my way. If he never gets better. He is exactly what I want and how I want him right now. And the liberty of that, of not needing the one you love to be something else, and finally believing that he wants you just as you are . . . that the constancy of his desire through years, fluctuating dress sizes, and barrier after barrier he keeps knocking down to get to you, is real. That you can trust his passion. That his desire is authentic, and even though he’s sometimes a black-hearted man, what he feels for you is pure. Who would chase something as hard as Jared has chased me if you didn’t want it badly?

“Kiss me,” I whisper, training my eyes on him. “I want to taste like you.”

A warning flare fires in his eyes.

“Banner, you can’t say things like that to me wearing this dress and looking the way you do tonight.”

God, and here I was fretting over my wide, square ass. Concerned about my Spanx-less jiggles, and he is looking at me like I’m his last supper. I turn my head to kiss one palm, framing my face and then to kiss the other. I suck at the warm skin of his wrist, pulling the pounding pulse between my teeth, feeling his life blood throb against my tongue.

“Jesus, Ban,” he rasps, sliding his other hand down to my waist, skimming over my well-rounded curves, cupping my ass. “I’m horny as hell right now. We probably shouldn’t. I won’t be able to stop.”

I reach down to grip the rigid line of cock in his pants.

“Who said you’d have to stop?”

“But Zo—”

“Knows it was you,” I say, tipping up to kiss his neck. “He finished his chemo last week and will not stop me from helping him if I need to no matter what comes next.”

He swallows convulsively, shuts his eyes tightly.

“I don’t want your reputation ruined,” he says, concern sketched between his dark blond brows. “I know I said I didn’t care if you cheated, but I don’t want people thinking you’re anything other than the incredible woman you are. What you’ve done for Zo . . . I don’t deserve you.”

“But you’ll have me anyway, right?” I remind him of his own words

“I have no choice,” he says hoarsely. “I love you.”

That word. The one I just assigned to the desperate, persistent, stubborn passion lodged in my heart for him. Hearing it on his lips steals any resolve I have.

“And I love you, Jared Foster.” I speak the words against his mouth, breathe them into him so he’ll believe me. “Exactly as you are.”

Hearing the same acceptance from me that I see in him, hear from him, opens the cage door on the passion he’s checked, at my request, for the last three months.

“Exactly as I am, huh?” He dips to grab the hem of my dress and drags it up over my legs, the cool air electrically charged with every new inch of me he reveals. He thrusts sure fingers inside my thong. There’s no fumbling or searching. Jared could find my clit in a cave. I’m already wet and swollen. He drops his forehead to mine, his breath heavy and hot over my lips.

“Hallelujah,” he whispers. “This pussy has made a believer out of me.”

My quick laugh bounces off the bathroom walls.

“You can’t say that. It’s borderline blasphemous.”

“As long as we don’t cross the line, and I think I’ve had about enough of you telling me what I can and cannot say about a pussy that is mine.” He smiles down at me, the same wicked man he’s been since our days at Kerrington, but there’s a new contentment in his eyes.

“It is yours,” I agree, my smile fading. “I am, too.”

“Dammit,” he mutters into my hair, slides his mouth over my jaw, down my neck. “I don’t want anyone to catch us, for them to talk badly about you.”

“You let me worry about my reputation.” I chase his mouth until I catch it, kiss it. Own it the way he owns mine. We moan and growl into the kiss, with my hands tugging his shirt from the waistband of his pants. He digs his fingers into my upswept hair, and cool strands brush my bare skin as they fall. He hoists my skirt higher, and I hear a seam tear.

“Face the wall.” His voice is harsh. Insistent.

“Oh, God, hurry,” I turn, panting against the wall. I’m wet between my legs and my nipples are like quarters, hard and round under the tight dress.

The sound of his zipper is Pavlovian, and my pussy drips like he pulled a lever, a conditioned response to the sensual prompt. My hands flatten on the wall, ass angled for him, so ready for him, when my fantasy morphs into my worst nightmare, frame by frame.

“Banner!” The voice comes stridently. “¿Dónde estás?”

This cannot be happening.

“Mama?” I bang my head on the bathroom wall.

“Your mom?” Jared hisses. He drops my dress and hastily zips his pants.

“Sí, Madre.” I’m blinking furiously, frantically righting my dress and running fingers through my half-up, half-down ’do.