Shit! Had I been way too presumptuous in considering Hudson Montgomery a friend?
“I’m sorry, I guess I just thought—”
“Don’t,” Hudson cut me off. “This is my issue, not yours, and you haven’t done a damn thing to encourage me, but understand that I’m never going to see you as some kind of buddy of mine.”
Tears sprang to my eyes immediately. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that the two of us were very, very different, but I cared so much about Hudson that it was excruciatingly painful to hear that he didn’t feel the same way.
Maybe the majority of men weren’t dying to go out with me, but it was the first time I’d ever had a friendship with one of them completely tossed back in my face.
Unfortunately, it was also the first time I’d wanted to be close to somebody so damn much.
“Understood,” I mumbled because I couldn’t get any other response out of my mouth.
“No, I don’t think you do understand,” Hudson rasped. “If I could possibly treat you like a friend, I would, but I can’t. I’ve never in my life wanted to fuck a single one of my friends or buddies. My dick doesn’t get rock-hard the second one of them walks into the room. And I sure as hell don’t think about bending them over a kitchen counter while they’re scooping ice cream. I know I don’t fucking obsess over their safety, whether they’re well, or if they’re happy every goddamn minute of the day until I’m half crazy. I’ve never jerked myself off thinking about what it would be like to hear them screaming my name while they were coming so hard that it seemed like that pleasure was never going to end.” He stopped abruptly, and sucked down the entire tumbler of whiskey in his hand in a single large gulp.
Holy shit!
I watched him, my entire body tight with shock, as he visibly tried to get his emotions under control.
He clenched his fists and then released them, and he did it over and over again until some of the tension on his gorgeous face started to ease.
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut until I could wrap my head around what he’d just said.
He put the tumbler down on the small table beside him, and added, “I’ve never felt this way about anyone. It’s. Just. You. So don’t ask me to try to act like you’re a friend when all I really want is to get as intimate with you as two people can get.”
My hand was shaking when I took a sip of my wine this time.
My emotions were probably even more chaotic than his at the moment.
My heart was racing, and I could barely catch my breath.
I’d wanted Hudson Montgomery almost the same way since the beginning.
At first, he’d been my rescuer.
Then, the person who had been beside me at one of the worst times of my life. The guy who didn’t seem to mind hauling me from one room to another, and wasn’t embarrassed even when I needed help to pee.
After that, Hudson had been my safe place to fall while I was getting my shit together.
But truthfully, I’d always wanted him.
I’d wanted to lick every inch of his powerful body since the first time I’d seen it.
Intimacy wasn’t really something I was completely comfortable with, but God, I’d wanted it. I’d craved it with this man. Just like him, I’d gotten myself off to carnal fantasies about him.
But I’d never, not in a million years, thought he’d felt the same way.
Maybe I had hoped I’d seen desire on his face last night, but it hadn’t been difficult to discard the entire idea of somebody like Hudson wanting…me.
I wasn’t sophisticated.
I wasn’t beautiful.
I didn’t really know how to be flirty.
I didn’t know how to be a woman Hudson might be attracted to, but he was. It was written all over his face tonight, and it wasn’t my imagination.
Last night’s perceived desire had been real, too.
A large tear dropped to my cheek, but I didn’t give a damn.
Hudson had just made himself so vulnerable to me that it ripped me up inside.
He wasn’t the kind of guy who just blurted out the way he felt, or gave someone all the ammunition to destroy him if that was their goal.
Luckily, that wasn’t my ambition.
What I really wanted was to get him naked, and satisfy every dirty fantasy he’d ever