Chapter 9

Jason, who’d taken Colby’s hand once, understood. Intimacy stolen out of public view. A commitment made sweeter by the ache of restraint. By the brush of skin to skin, laid bare.

Colby had chosen. Had put his hand into Jason’s, given the invitation.

And Jason needed to stop remembering, imagining, wondering. For one thing, he didn’t have the right. For another, those imaginings were starting to cause certain effects in his jeans, sensation simultaneously pleasurable and potentially embarrassing and startling. He knew what he liked, as far as sweetness and surrender actively forthrightly given; he could not remember a time when he’d gone achingly hard from the memory of a touch of a hand.

Dammit. He had to stop thinking about Colby Kent. About wide blue eyes with their unusual darker outer ring of color, about the sparkle in them when saying Captainlike a dare, like a tease—