I stopped stroking, but I didn’t lift my hand. “Am I hurting you?”
He gave a garbled, strangled laugh-sob, and my gaze flew to his. Then I couldn’t look away.
“There’s hurt,” he said, “then there’s agony.”
I yanked back as if I’d been burned. My palm continued to pulse with heat so intense my skin tingled. The breeze kicked up and stirred the damp tendrils on my brow. Our lips met. It was inevitable.
The kiss was harsh, desperate, greedy, needy—everything that roiled within me reflected in him. My mouth opened, tongues warred. I licked his teeth; he nipped my lip. I returned the favor along his gloriously stubbled jaw.
My hand was on his leg again, but higher up. The heat remained. If I rubbed my thumb across his tip as I’d rubbed it along the imaginary line of his break would sparks fly? I had to find out.
I traced where I had a dozen times before, about half an inch below his belt, right where an erection should end.
It didn’t. He was as soft as Reggie’s ears.
What was going on? He wasn’t kissing me like an uninterested man. He was kissing me like a man drowning in desire, one who couldn’t wait to bury himself inside of me.
But there’d be no burying anywhere with a shovel like that.
He lifted his mouth. I wanted it back. He tasted like sex and love and life—three things I’d had precious little of since he’d left.
“I haven’t been able to—” His lips, full and wet and inviting, tightened. “Since the accident.” His head drooped, and he let out a laugh that was anything but amused. “I think it’s broken too.”
The idea of him trying to mend “it” with anyone but me made my fingers clench. They were still close enough to his nonerection to brush against it. A single spark made him jump. That jump pressed him to my wrist. My hand cupped him and warmth spread. I stroked, and the warmth flared into heat. Something else jumped. I ran my thumb where I’d felt movement and was rewarded with a growing pressure from the other side of his jeans.
“Huh,” he murmured, face full of the same wonder it had held the very first time I’d touched him like this.
“Doesn’t feel broken.” I yanked on the snap, pulled down the zipper. “Let’s make sure.”
I dipped my fingers inside, curled them around him. He went so hard he seemed to fill my hand in an instant. I pumped him once, and he groaned, closed his eyes, arched.
Nope, not broken at all.
“This is … This is…”
“Amazing.” I continued my movements. He got harder, larger, even more so.
“It is. You are.” He looked down, and his eyes widened. “Apparently I am.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and he kissed me again.
The desperation remained, a definite need for speed. I understood. Any man who’d thought “it” was broken, then found that it wasn’t, would be frantic to use it before it broke again.
He fumbled with my shirt, the button on my jeans, the actions both sweet and disturbing. I didn’t want it broken before I used it either.
I pulled back, and he set his forehead to mine. “Sorry. This is nuts. We can’t—”
“We can. We will. We are.” I circled his wrists, met his eyes. “But let’s just lose our clothes and save some time. Okay?”
His lips curved. He yanked his T-shirt over his head, kicked off his shoes, shucked his already open pants and everything else.
Next he busied himself spreading the blankets from the corner—Reggie’s, but I was pretty sure the dog would share—across the truck bed. I was glad, not only because I’d rather get naked unobserved but because I was momentarily distracted—and distressed—by the scars on his body that hadn’t been there before.
By the time he’d made our bed, I’d managed to not only drag my gaze from the criss-cross slashes of pink and white, some worse than others, the one on his thigh really bad—but toss my shirt, jeans, shoes, socks, and panties in a pile of their own.
I joined him on the makeshift bed, thrilled to observe that he remained “unbroken.” Even more thrilled that the truck shielded us from view on three sides. He yanked the tailgate up—make that four sides. We’d hear any cars approaching on the dirt path from a long way off, and Reggie would make sure nothing and no one else approached in any other direction.
Privacy was nice, but right now I didn’t much care.