Lily shelved her persistent doubts. He would want her, she decided, as a wave of arousal edged up her spine. No matter what she had to do, no matter who she had to be, she was going to claim Travis that night.
Travis’s eyes marked her as his, and only his. For once they understood each other as a man and a woman. And then she was standing just inches from him, her full br**sts pressed up against his T-shirt, his heat burning through her.
Twenty years of hurt fell away. The only thing that mattered to Lily was the lust coursing through her veins.
Needing desperately to touch him, Lily’s hand caressed his hard jaw, memorizing the lines of his face, before moving up to run her thumb along his lower lip. His tongue found the sensitive pad of her thumb, and she stilled, unable to do or focus on anything other than the sensation of his tongue on her skin. She was slick and already as close to an orgasm as she had ever been. His hand was on hers, callused and strong and warm, and he was pressing a hot kiss into the pulse at her wrist.
His lips moved away, and her skin felt cool and bereft. His face came down toward her and she could feel the warmth of his breath on her lips.
“Travis,” she whispered, and she felt his surprise.
His lips tightened, and a swift strike of fear passed through her that he would leave her high and dry and desperate for him.
“You know who I am?”
“I’ve always known,” she said boldly. “And now it’s your turn to find out who I am.”
She slid her hand along his taut, well-muscled arm, reveling in the feel of the light dusting of hair against the tips of her fingers. Every inch of her skin was on fire as she wrapped her fingers around his.
Travis read her mind, and before she could lead him to the dance floor, he was moving them toward it.
She loved the way the other women in the room looked at her. She knew the look of jealousy too well.
She knew how it felt to watch someone else press close to Travis. She had been watching girls throw themselves at Travis since first grade.
At last it was her turn. Wouldn’t it be heavenly, she thought, if he threw himself right back at her?
It would be a dream come true.
Lily breathed in the faint scent of his cologne. She could drown in him. The crowds of dancers parted for them. Lily was shocked to realize that Travis wasn’t the only one getting admiring glances.
Straight out of her fantasies, it seemed that all of the men in the room were looking at her with desire radiating from their eyes. In one of her favorite fantasies she was in charge of a group of prisoners, the naughtiest one, of course, being Travis. She would whip them into sexual frenzies, not letting them touch her until they were about to explode with wanting her. The other men could lick her and stroke her, but only Travis could thrust into her with his huge, hard shaft.
In The Dress, maybe all of her dreams would come true. Especially the part where Travis braced his heavy weight over her and slid into her wetness, hot and relentless.
Lily had to resist pinching herself to see if she would wake up as she moved in Travis’s arms, to see if it really was just a dream. No, she thought, if it is a dream, I don’t want to know.
Travis stopped in the middle of the dance floor and pulled her into his arms. One of his hands slid to the curve of her hips while the other was alarmingly close to her br**sts.
“Lily,” he said.
She looked up at him, her blue eyes bright with longing. “Travis,” she whispered, then ran the tip of her tongue along the edge of her upper lip.
He groaned and started to lean down for what Lily hoped was a kiss, the first of many if she had her way. Her eyelids fluttered closed, but then she felt Travis pull back ever so slightly. Her eyes flew open.
“Lily,” he said, “I…”
Bolder than she ever thought she could be, Lily laid a finger on his perfect lips. “Don’t speak,” she said. It was a command, not a request. “Tonight is not for talking.”
Relief flashed across Travis’s face, but Lily didn’t care. The last thing she wanted was for their time to be ruined with apologies and second-guessing. She didn’t forgive him for the way he had treated her for the past twenty years, but at that moment, warm and aroused in his arms, none of it mattered.
All she cared about was kissing Travis and licking Travis and, oh God, hopefully coming beneath Travis, too.
His mouth was on hers and his hands were in her hair and he was stealing all the breath from her lungs.
Lily wanted to memorize this kiss so that she could play it back to herself in her lonely bathtub on cold nights, but she was so stunned by the sensations washing through her that her brain was on the verge of shutting off completely.
First hard, then unbearably soft, his lips ruled hers, coaxing a whimper of ecstasy from her core. Lily had been kissed before but not like this. Not by someone who could teach a course on the art of kissing.