Her hair was a tangle on the pillow. The curls tried to ensnare his fingers. He pulled them free to trace the shape of her ear, to tug gently on the velvety lobe, outline her lips, and skate along the delicate ridge of her collarbone. He cupped her breast in his palm and lightly pinched her nipple. Its immediate response roused his resting cock.
Her hand found it and began a languorous caress.
And though her stroking caused a fever to spread through him, he continued his exploration of her in the same unrushed manner, venturing to even more seductive terrain that he didn’t want to underappreciate because of haste.
She purred when he brushed his fingers through the hair between her thighs. They were relaxed and slightly separated. He noticed on the inside of one what he thought at first was a birthmark. Then he realized what it was.
“Oh, hell. I’m sorry. I didn’t know that kiss was so rough.”
“It wasn’t rough, it was ardent,” she said softly.
“Does it hurt?”
“Did or do you hear me complaining?”
In the deepest, darkest, basest part of his masculine soul, he was glad he had marked her, even if it was temporary. He rubbed the red spot with the pad of his thumb. “Arden?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m no poet, so I’ll just say it.”
“I’m listening.”
“I like you naked and looking well fucked.”
She laughed. “I like it, too.”
She put one hand behind her head and lay there, studying him. “On some elemental plane, I think I knew it from the moment I saw you.”
“Knew what?”
“That we, this, was bound to happen. When you turned around and pushed the safety goggles up to your forehead, I…It was like a quickening. Here.” She laid her hand on her stomach. “In spite of your being surly and trying to intimidate me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were.”
He admitted it with a rueful nod.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because my ‘quickening’ took place a little lower than yours.”
“Here?” Her fingers tightened around him.
He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed out. “Yeah, there. I’d seen you, yeah, but I wasn’t ready for the stretchy t-shirt and blue jean skirt. I got instantly drive-a-nail hard. Scared the hell out of me.”
“So your rudeness was a defense mechanism against the sudden attraction?”
“Not the attraction itself, but the unlikelihood that anything could come of it.”
“If nothing was to come of it, you decided not even to bother being polite, but to act like a jerk instead.”
“Something like that, I guess.”
Pensively, she said, “That makes sense, because it didn’t take me long to recognize in you something I’ve often been cursed with.”
“What’s that?”
“Loneliness,” she whispered. “Your macho posturing made me mad. But I also came away thinking that underneath the tough-guy veneer, you were a lonely person, and that possibly your loneliness was self-imposed. I believe my intuition was right.”
She removed her hand from his cock and placed it on his thigh, just above his knee, and rubbed it tenderly. And somehow that caress was ten times more intimate than the other. She was comforting and consoling him.
Which God knew he didn’t deserve, and which she wouldn’t be doing if she knew how badly he was deceiving her. He couldn’t allow it. He lifted her hand from his leg and kissed the palm of it.
She touched his left biceps. “What’s this?”
He turned his arm so she could see the tattoo better in the dim light. She traced the familiar figure eight with her fingertip. “Why the infinity symbol?”
Even after she withdrew her finger, he continued to stare at the marking that held such meaning for him. “Whatever we do stays with us forever. We can’t shake it, can’t escape it. It’s eternal, there even after we die.”
She frowned. “Wait. Aren’t you the one who advised me to acknowledge the past, then to turn my back on it and move on?”
“I later said that was horseshit.”
But she wasn’t smiling at his quip. Her expression was serious and inquisitive. “What is it you can’t shake or escape, Ledge?”
Tell her. Tell her now.
He looked toward the window where their bourbons remained untouched on the sill. The ice cubes had melted.
Selfish bastard that he was, he wanted to indulge in a few more minutes of this interlude before shattering her opinion of him.
The rain continued to come down, but not as hard as before. He said, “I have an idea.”
“All right.”
“You don’t know what I have in mind.”
“Do I have to move?”
“Not much.”
He got off the bed and hiked on his jeans but didn’t bother buttoning them up all the way.