I need for her to be mine. I need her.

I’m tracing the line of her soft lips with my tongue, but she isn’t opening fast enough for me so I decide to lay siege. To penetrate her defenses, my tongue pushes through the barrier of her lips with only little resistance. Then she sighs and relaxes against me.

I take her shoulders in my grasp and pull her against me. Suddenly, we are fused together, her heat and my heat. The feel of her against me is so, so good.

“Wil,” she whispers. “Come upstairs with me.”

I don’t want to think about this or have this fight—and I know it will be a fight until she finally admits that I’ve won. Until then, I can’t give in.

“Stay here and be my girlfriend,” I reply.

I want to touch her again. All over her body. I want to make her moan. I want that painful tension in my body screaming for her to relieve it.

But more than anything, I want her to be mine.

Her hand presses against my chest and she pushes away, avoiding my eyes. Which is good because I really don’t want to look into them. My stomach feels as if I’ve just swallowed eighty pounds of steel.

“I should go,” she says breathlessly. Then she slowly leans back, opens the car door and then even more slowly climbs out, as if giving me the chance to change my mind.

I won’t.

I can’t.

Time is running short, but I can still make this happen

***

The following Sunday, Jenna and I go to the Santa Ana Zoo together in search of more crowds. Afterward, we end up at my dad’s house for another family dinner. Kim has invited everyone she could think of, apparently. Along with our regular group, some of Mia’s friends are here, including Heath—who mostly sits in a corner and drinks beer—Alex and Kat. Jenna is spending most of her time with the girls, and I’m stuck watching her from afar.

After a while, I feel the need to retreat, so I excuse myself to the bathroom and then slip into my old room at the back of the house. There, I take inventory of and dust my all-but-forgotten D&D figurines. It’s been more than eight months since I’ve painted any. My job, blacksmithing and sword training have consumed the majority of my waking hours. I’m arranging the figurines on their shelf when Jenna enters and looks around.

“Mia was right! She said that you’d be back here.”

“She knows me well.” I point to the only chair in the room. “I was sitting in that chair when I first met her twenty-two months ago.” Something I said amuses her because her smile grows wide and her teeth are showing. I can never tell if someone is finding me amusing or ridiculous, so I proceed regardless. “The night I met her, I knew that Adam was serious about her. It was the first time he’d ever brought a woman with him to family dinner.”

“Well, seeing as they’re getting married, I’d say you were right.”

I turn back to the figurines. “I’m seldom right about stuff like that, but I’m glad I wasn’t wrong about Mia and Adam.”

“It seems you’re not the only one. Not only did Adam find a fiancée, but your dad found a new wife when he met her mom. That’s such a cool story. I think that Mia and Adam think so too—until Jordan brings up the whole step-cousin thing.”

She watches me for a moment, then says, “I don’t think you need to worry about them not getting married. They’ve been through a lot. If that didn’t break them, nothing will.”

“I just think it makes sense to make it official.” I shrug. “I’m not an expert, but I like things finalized and settled.”

“Well,” she says with a small laugh as she reaches up to finger a button on my shirt, “there’s always their bet—”

I tense, my face flushing with heat. “Do not talk about that bet!”

She laughs again but doesn’t remove her finger. I grab her around the wrist and hold her hand there. She looks up into my eyes, and I have nanoseconds to escape her gaze.

“I don’t like it when things don’t go according to plan. Adam and Mia should get it over with if they know that’s what they want to do. What’s the point in waiting? I like to have everything figured out ahead of time. I like to be certain of the future.”

She bites her lip. “Life doesn’t always work out that way, Wil. I once thought I knew exactly what I’d be doing with my future, but…” Her voice trails off and it sounds sad again.

I can smell her hair as she turns to look at the figurines. I take mental note of the ones she admires. Maybe I’ll give a few to her later. I realize that I’m still holding her wrist and she’s not pulling away from me.

“Goddess, it’s been ages since I’ve played D&D. I miss it. I never collected figurines like you do, but I have lots and lots of dice.”

I glance at the dresser behind my worktable. “My old dice are in here too.”

“Really? Can I see them?”

“You want to see my dice?”

She smiles. “Yes, like any self-respecting geek girl, I do have a dice fetish.”

I move away from her to dig through the drawers to find my old bag of dice. Then I empty the worn velvet bag out onto my worktable. A pile of dice roll out across the scratched and stained surface. They are all different colors and—as they’re Dungeons and Dragons dice—all different shapes and sizes as well.

By some weird coincidence, Jenna picks up my lucky d20. It’s amber colored with black numbers on the faces. The twenty-sided die, the most famous of all the types of dice used in D&D, is an icosahedron—a symmetrical polyhedron with twenty faces.

She rolls it across the table and…a natural twenty. She laughs. “Nat 20. It’s my lucky night. Too bad we aren’t playing.”

“You and I could play.”

Her brows rise. “Right now? Like…we could role-play something?”

I shrug. “I wasn’t a Dungeon Master—I could never come up with the storylines. But I could be an average character, perhaps a blacksmith who sometimes moonlights as a knight.”

She looks me up and down. “You’re far from average.” She folds her arms across her chest in a way that makes her t-shirt tighten over her breasts. I instantly recall the vision of her spread out on my couch, making those noises of pleasure when I was touching and kissing her breasts. The memory alone makes me hard. Painfully hard.