again, without pausing. Then, while Leah’s frown had shifted to a look of bewilderment, Nick lifted her against his chest with one hand behind her back. With his free hand, he gathered her hair and collected it to one side, his fingers brushing her neck, her collarbones, and the soft curve of her shoulders.
Oh, yes, they were going to be intimate.
“I have tried to consider how I might be your friend.” Leah got one entire sentence out and fell silent. Nick felt a gratifying sense of progress.
“I would like to be your friend too,” Nick murmured, easing her down to the bed again. “Tell me how to do that.”
“You can’t,” Leah said through clenched teeth. Nick trailed the backs of his fingers down her bare arm, from her shoulder to her wrist and back up again. “You are too cuddly.”
Cuddly. Nobody had accused him of this previously. He rather liked the notion, coming from her. “This is a problem, how?” Nick asked, stroking her arm with deliberation.
“You are always touching people,” Leah said in a rush. “You hug, and pet, and kiss, and clasp hands…”
“I do like to touch.” Nick leaned down and brushed a kiss over Leah’s forehead. He sat back up and smiled down at her in the waning firelight. She looked vaguely puzzled and disoriented. Like she was trying to recall what, exactly, had been coming out of her own mouth. Nick smoothed her hair back from her face and kissed her again, this time on the cheek.
“You smell good,” he murmured. “Like spring.”
“That’s another thing. You always smell delicious, better than a man should, and it isn’t just your shaving soap.”
“No?” She spouted the oddest, most endearing notions when she was flustered.
“No. You are clean about your person and in your habits.”
“And this disqualifies me from friendship?” Nick queried, his lips landing on the unbruised side of her jaw, slowly working their way up to her cheek before he lifted back up to sitting position.
“You smell too good to be just my friend,” Leah informed him desperately. “You kiss too well, your touch is too… too…”
“Yes?” He pressed a chaste kiss to her lips and retreated one half inch. “You were saying?” Lazily, he brushed her hair back again, his gaze following the caress of his fingers.
“Kiss me, Nicholas.”
“What are friends for?” Nick whispered, claiming her lips gently. He plied her with easy, relaxed strokes of his tongue, burrowing his hands under her shoulders and bracing himself on his forearms. He nibbled, he tasted, he teased until Leah’s tongue entered the lists and her fingers winnowed through his hair and her body began to shift on the bed in slow, needy undulations.
“Please, God… Yes, more…”
“Easy, lovey,” Nick crooned, drawing back one half inch again. “We have all the time in the world.”
They did not. If she didn’t stop moving against him like this, if she didn’t stop touching him everywhere he’d exposed his skin, he would soon lose his wits entirely.
Leah whimpered into his mouth and half rolled to hook her leg over his hips. “What, lovey?” Nick murmured. “Tell me.”
“Come. Here.” Leah’s hands went dodging south, to try to encircle Nick’s waist and drag him over her, but fortunately for his flagging self-restraint, she got distracted on the vast plane of his chest, delineating slabs of muscle, ribs, sternum, and… nipples.
“Easy.” Nick tried to catch one of those hands as it skimmed directly over a nipple, paused, and returned for closer investigation.
Leah left off plundering his mouth long enough to gaze up at him. “Will I hurt you? Here?” Another feathery, shivery brush of her fingers.
“Never. Not ever.” Though she would kill him dead, dead, dead with her innocent explorations. He closed his eyes and waited for her to set her hands loose on him again.
She used both hands, and Nick lifted a few inches to allow her free run of his chest. Kissing paused as the fascination of caressing and being caressed became too absorbing, then too frustrating.
“Nicholas, get in this bed, please.”
He knew a moment’s indecision—did he get under the covers with her? Try for the nightgown now? Shuck his bloody, bedamned, infernally too-tight breeches? No, not that, because the sight of his erect cock would give her the vapors, virgin or not—and do nothing to calm the riot in his body. He stood, lifted the covers, and budged in as Leah obligingly shifted to the center of the bed.
“Better,” Leah muttered, turning her face into his bicep.