her skin could in some way soften the fact that she’d just made her intention to spend one night with him, and one night only, perfectly clear.
He lifted her hand to his lips, knew that was as close as he could get to kissing her again until they were behind the locked doors of his house—unless they wanted to get arrested for indecent exposure in his car.
As sure as Valentina was that this couldn’t go past one night, he was even more sure they were going to end up in it for the long haul. Just like his siblings and their mates. Just like his mother and father.
Chapter Thirteen
As soon as they were parked in his garage, Smith jumped out of his car, yanked open Valentina’s door, and scooped her up into his arms.
“Don’t forget the cupcakes.” His brain was barely getting enough blood by that point to wrap around the fact that she actually still wanted dessert until she whispered, “As soon as I saw them, I pictured us eating them naked in bed.”
Jesus, he thought as he paused only long enough for her to reach down and grab the box of cupcakes, he was as close to losing it as he’d ever been, despite the fact that they both still had their clothes on and they were a good hundred feet from his bedroom.
But as much as he wanted her in his bed, naked beneath him as he made love to her the way he’d been dreaming of for too damn long, he couldn’t keep his mouth off hers any longer. Not when he was finally holding her in his arms, and she was looking at him with such heat in her beautiful eyes, a flush of sensual anticipation staining her high cheekbones and coloring her unpainted lips a dark rose.
Standing holding her in the middle of his living room, Smith lowered his mouth to Valentina’s in a kiss so soft, so sweet, it was more a breath than a meeting of their lips. Low down, his gut twisted tight as he tasted the exotic spice of her with a long, slow swipe of his tongue over her full bottom lip. Her soft moan of pleasure at the sensual touch had him tightening his hold on her, and his lips pressing deeper against hers. When her tongue found his and stroked against it, it was his moan sounding in the room.
Finally, he was getting to kiss her, hold her. And as she stroked one hand over his jaw while opening herself up even more to his kiss, and kissing him back with unabashed passion, she was so much sexier, so much sweeter, than he’d dreamed.
Again and again he tasted every inch of her mouth, the sensitive corners, the curves and contours of the cupid’s bow at the top of her upper lip, then back yet one more time to nip at the fullness of her bottom lip before laving over the small hurt with his tongue.
On a gasping breath, Valentina whispered his name. “Smith. You’re making my head spin.”
“Good,” he said before he kissed her again. He wasn’t even close to having his fill of her mouth as he pulled back just far enough to tell her, “Because it’s what you’ve done to me from the very first moment I saw you.”
But even as his words sounded against her lips, she was licking out against him, making him even crazier to have her, and this time when they kissed, gentleness gave way completely to greediness, to the need to turn desire into possession.
“Please,” she begged on a rasping breath when he let her free for just long enough to try to catch her breath.
“Tell me,” he urged her even as he had to steal another taste of her lips. “What do you need, Valentina?”
“More.”
Her confession nearly took him all the way over, without anything more than their kisses to get him there. And yet, this anticipation, the shockingly sensual dance where they drew out each other’s pleasure with simple kisses, with gentle caresses, was too good to turn away from just yet.
“Yes,” he agreed as he dropped his mouth to hers again and drank in the pure sweetness of her response, “I could keep kissing you forever.”
As they’d kissed, her hazel eyes had dilated until the brown had been edged out almost completely by green.
“Everywhere.”
The one word from her lips was full of so much need, so much desire, that what was left of the blood flow to