DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 104

Chapter 104

Daisy

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His voice came from below almost immediately after I screamed his name.

“Daisy?!”

“Up here!” My voice cracked slightly. “The balcony railing, I cannot get down, please-”

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I heard movement, fast and purposeful, and then he was there, coming through the balcony doors, crossing to me in long strides with his jacket already off and his expression somewhere between alarmed and furious.

“What are you-” he stopped when he saw exactly how I was positioned, and something in his face shifted. “Okay. Okay, give me your hand.”

“I can’t let go of the railing—”

“Daisy. Give me your hand.”

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I loosened one hand and reached back toward him. His fingers closed around my wrist immediately, firm and certain, and then his other arm came around my waist, and he lifted me clean off the railing and back over onto the balcony floor in one movement.

My heels hit solid ground.

My legs were not entirely steady.

His arms were still around me, and I let them be for a moment, just stood there and breathed, feeling the solid floor beneath my feet and the warmth of him and the city still glittering beyond the railing, looking completely unbothered by my ordeal.

My bottom lip trembled.

I didn’t mean for it to. It just did, pushing forward slightly in that embarrassing way that meant tears were approximately four seconds behind it.

“I was so scared,” I said, and my voice came out small and nothing like me at all. “I was scared you wouldn`t see me.”

“It’s fine,” he said quietly, his arms still around me. “I’m here now.”

And then I cried. Not elegantly, not quietly – properly cried, face pressed against his shoulder, hands fisted in his shirt, the kind of crying that had been sitting in my chest since that morning in the war room and had found its exit at the worst possible moment on a balcony at a black-tie gala.

He said nothing. He just held me.

When I finally pulled back and looked up at him, his expression was unreadable. He looked at my face for a long moment, then the corner of his mouth lifted.

8:41 Tue, Jun 30

Chapter 101

“So do you owe me a kiss?”

I blinked. Then I pushed him. “I still hate you.”

“I’m joking.” He raised both hands. “Don’t take it so personally.”

I turned to leave. Then I stopped.

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I don’t know what made me do it. The wine, the night, the way he’d held me without making it into anything. The fact that his arms had felt exactly the way I’d spent three years pretending I didn’t remember.

I turned back around.

He was close. Closer than I’d realized, and he took one small step back when I turned, his expression shifting to something carefully neutral. “What is it?”

I looked at him for a second.

“One kiss,” I said.

Then I reached up, grabbed his shirt by the chest, and pulled him down to me before either of us could think about it. It was soft and brief. My lips against his for just a moment, barely anything, more a statement than a kiss. I pulled back.

He opened his eyes slowly and looked at me with bulging, surprised eyes.

“That’s not a kiss,” he said.

Before I could respond, his arm came around my waist and pulled me in, his other hand finding the side of my face, and then he kissed me properly.

It was nothing like mine.

It started slow, unhurried and deliberate, like he had all the time in the world and intended to use it, his lips moving against mine with the quiet confidence of someone who knew exactly what they were doing and exactly what it would do to me. I felt it move through me in a wave, starting at my mouth and traveling down through my chest, my stomach, all the way to my fingertips, where they were still curled into his shirt.

Then it deepened.

His hand tightened at my waist, drawing me closer until there was no space left between us, and the kiss

faintly like his drink, warm and familiar in a way that shifted into something that tasted like the evening made my chest ache because I knew this taste. I had always known this taste. Three years and I still knew it like a song I hadn’t heard in a long time but my body had never forgotten.

My fingers loosened in his shirt and then gripped tighter.

He kissed me like we weren’t standing on a balcony at an industry gala. Like there was no one inside, no Evelyn, no Steve, no contract, no three years of carefully maintained distance. Like none of it had ever happened, and we were just two people who fit together in a way that made no logical sense and always had.

8:41 Tue, Jun 30

Chapter 104

When he finally pulled back, I realized my eyes had closed at some point without me noticing.

I opened them slowly.

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