Her soft smile made his stomach tighten. “You stalk all the pretty girls?”

“Just looking for one.”

Her eyes sparkled and her smile spread even wider. “Have you found her yet?”

He cocked a brow, disconcerted by her interest.

Then she held something out, and her voice dropped to a shaky whisper. “Is this her, Zach?”

Paige’s picture.

His eyes flew to hers, his breath stopping halfway down his throat.

His stomach caved in on itself, his gut twisted, and he felt … violated. Revealed.

“Did I give this to you?” she asked softly.

Climbing gradually to his feet, neck and cheeks flaming hot, he grasped the picture and stared at a spot past her shoulder. “We were kids.” He said it with a tinge of self-mockery, a smile of contempt. “We were kids, we didn’t have a clue about anything.”

She craned her neck to fully face him, her smile fading. “But you’re a man now. And I found it under your pillow.”

He set his jaw, disgusted with himself. “Here.” He nudged her arm with the photo. “You want it back?”

She recoiled when he attempted to give it to her, folding her arms back. “No.”

“Take it,” he insisted.

“I don’t want it.”

“Take it.”

“I said I don’t want it!”

He could smell her, a scent unique to her, of soap and skin and flowers. Zach inhaled her like a caveman, an animal, desperate to cling to her aroma and even more desperate to find where it came from.

Swallowing with difficulty, he lowered the picture, and with a little sound of despair, Paige wrapped her arms around herself. “But maybe you don’t want it anymore,” she said in a tattered whisper.

Her chest labored. Her breasts rose and fell, rose and fell, stretching the white fabric of her blouse, begging Zach’s starving eyes and aching hands and every living, breathing part of him to notice those perfect, perky, thrusting globes.

Wrenching his eyes away, he set the picture aside and moved to the window. He didn’t answer her. Couldn’t talk. He wanted to kiss her for hours and hours and hours until they ended up naked. Until they ended up spent.

But no. It had taken weeks—no, months—of tenderly pillaging Paige’s sensual mouth to graduate to fondling her breasts. And he’d done that slowly, too. First just grazing the firm tips with his knuckles, smiling when she blushed, chuckling when she squeaked “we shouldn’t” while eagerly pushing those nipples out for him to do more.

“Did we have sex, Zach?”

Oh Christ. He was burning under his skin. He was dying here. And she mentioned—

“Were you my boyfriend?”

Had he been? What had he been? Zach gazed out the window, automatically absorbing the moonlit landscape as he wondered. What to tell her. How to define the way they’d wanted, needed, cared for each other, all the reckless things they did just to steal a few hours to be alone.

“But if you were my boyfriend,” she continued, “you would have looked for me. You would have … found me.”