“That’s true,” I whisper, and when I raise my eyes to his I can see the heat there. I want that heat. I want it, and right now, it doesn’t matter to me if it’ll hurt someday soon. It doesn’t matter if this ends up being the fight of my life.

“We could do it on the count of three,” I say, and he smiles, close-up and perfect and so, so sexy.

“This is your game.” He leans in, but he doesn’t kiss me. He puts his mouth right against my temple. “Picture it,” he says, and somehow, I know exactly what he means. A code between us, the way we first talked to each other, even before we knew each other. My letters, and his ability to read them.

“One,” he says.

And I see it, o-n-e, the o shaped in that space of skin between my hairline and the outer edge of my eyebrow, a looping, upward curve connection to the script n I’m imagining over the arch of that brow, which is where the feather-light touch of Reid’s lips has moved. The e at the bridge of my nose, a slim, delicate, terminal curve that fades away rather than ending.

My breath shudders between my parted lips.

“Two.”

He shifts, lets his lips rest softly against my cheekbone, and instead of pressing them there, he rubs them back and forth once, as light as a strand of my own hair in the wind, and I see that word, too, drawn in the same pink that’s the color of my natural blush, the pink I turn when I’m warm or embarrassed or aroused. The t, the w, the o, all of them a heavily sloped italic. All of them on the way to somewhere.

“Reid,” I whisper, and he moves his head back, traces his eyes over the spots where he kissed before looking into mine.

“May I?” he whispers back, and I let my eyes slide closed at this—the mannered, magnetic, Masterpiece Theatre perfection of it.

I nod.