like he’d touched every part of me with his fingers instead of his eyes. He saw the reaction, and his lips quirked.
“You’re all grown up, Violet,” he said, gaze returning to mine. His voice was husky. Deep with a longing that echoed my own. “But then, in many ways, you were always too old for your age.”
He reached out and hooked his pinky into mine, and just that simple, small act was enough to make my body, which had already been on high alert, almost explode. My anger at him nearly evaporated with the tenderness of the motion.
He pulled me gently toward the bar, handed my bag to Jada, and then kept going until we ended up on the balcony with the city lights sparkling around us. The breeze was blocked by the walls on either side of us, but it was still cold enough that I shivered.
Dawson did the unimaginable. He wrapped me in his arms from behind. A shelter of warmth. I leaned back into him, and his arms around me tightened. “I owe you an explanation,” he said softly.
I gave a barely perceptible nod.
He bent his head so his lips were next to my ear, his breath tickling my skin, sending more shivers through me that had nothing to do with the temperature or the thermodynamic numbers flying through my brain.
“The problem is,” he whispered, “if I tell you, it puts you at risk.”
I swallowed hard as my body continued to react to his touch, pebbling more from his nearness than the cold.
“Just spill it, Dawson,” I said.
His lips fluttered against the curve of my ear, a playful, sensual move that had my grip on his forearms flexing. Even as he teased, I could still feel the tension in him that had been there earlier as well. The tightness of his chest, the way he held his shoulders back. Secrets were eating him up.
“I’ve already imagined the worst,” I said quietly. “I’m pretty sure you couldn’t tell me anything that would surprise me at this point.”
I tilted my head, exposing more of my neck to the side, inviting him in. He groaned and then bit my earlobe softly before flicking his tongue along the skin. My knees went weak. I would have stumbled if he hadn’t been holding me up.
“You smell like heaven,” he said quietly. “A scent I’ve never been able to get out of my head since the very first day I met you.”
The fact that he was acknowledging an attraction to me that I’d wanted him to have for years made me want to cry and dance and shove my tongue in his mouth all at the same time. But I was also afraid of moving, afraid of breaking whatever trance or dream or fantasy we were both in at the moment. I made do with running my fingers up the sleeves of his dress shirt that he’d rolled to his elbows, my cool fingers skating over his warmth.
His lips hit the sensitive skin below my ear, and I literally couldn’t stop the moan that escaped me if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t, because the stiffness that had been in his shoulders and chest suddenly found its way to another part of his body. One that was pressed up tight against my rear end. One I could feel clearly through the thin layer of the silken dress.
I pushed back into it and was rewarded with a guttural growl from him.
He trailed kisses from my ear, down my neck, across my collarbone to the edge of my shoulder and back, inhaling deeply as he went as if he could absorb me through smell alone.
“Dawson,” I said with a soft cry of desire but also a beg. “Tell me.”
“That’s the Vi I know. There’s no distracting you.” He chuckled softly as he continued to layer kisses along my shoulder and neck.
“I want to be distracted. I want you to kiss every visible spot, then undo that damn bow and kiss every spot the dress is hiding,” I told him the truth.
He sucked in a breath, trying to pull back a little, but I moved my hands backward to his waist, locking him to me. Wanting him there. Wanting him to know that I didn’t just look like I’d grown up. I was grown up. I knew what to do with a man. I knew what I wanted from him.
“But I can’t be distracted from this,” I told him quietly. “I won’t let you destroy