The Promise of Paradise - By Allie Boniface Page 0,38

no right to even ask.

He pushed Ash’s hair from her face and nipped at her lips, her earlobes, the skin at the base of her neck. She jumped a little beneath him, a sizzling electrical wire. His hands moved to her waist, to her hips, to the pliant places along the small of her back. His thumbs moved in circles, stroking tender skin in the spaces where her shirt pulled away from her shorts. He grew hard and pulled her to him, letting her know what she did to him, how she turned him inside out.

“Eddie,” she breathed, and in that moment he wanted every part of her, there on the rooftop, beneath the sky. He drank her in, tasting her, pleading, licking, as she melted under his touch. Her hands came up to the back of his neck, nails digging into him. Eddie pulled back long enough to glimpse dark desire in her eyes.

His mouth found her ear, his words a ragged whisper. “God, I want you.”

Her response was a lifting of her hips, a pressing against him, heat matching heat. Her tongue wound around his, with quick little pants that made him loose in the knees. Hell, he’d wanted her since the first day he’d run up those stairs and stood in her doorway. He wanted her on the days they argued, on the days he came home too tired to breathe, on the complicated days when one woman or another let herself out of Eddie’s apartment. None of them mattered now. He couldn’t believe any of them ever had.

Ash was different from any other woman he’d ever met. More intelligent, more secretive, more sensual in the way she moved across a room. More heartbroken, too, though he didn’t yet know exactly what or who had devastated her. More confusing, more temperamental, more fragile some days. Was that why she turned him upside down with desire? That crazy combination that he’d never before run across in a woman? Because more than anything, he wanted to wind this amazing creature inside him, possess her, melt into her and lose a little of himself before coming up for air.

“Ash? Are you and Eddie still—oh...”

At Jen’s voice in the kitchen, Ash pulled away from him. Through the window, Eddie could see the blonde fishing around in the refrigerator. She held up a hand, as if to block her view. “Sorry. Pretend I was never here, okay?”

But it was too late. One inch between them turned to two and then six. Ash looked up at Eddie, a thousand questions in her eyes that he knew he couldn’t answer. I don’t know, he wanted to say. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what tomorrow brings. All I know is—

“Stay with me tonight,” he whispered. God, if she didn’t say yes, he was going to take her right here, neighbors be damned.

She shook her head. One hand lingered on his cheek, on his deepest scar, as she looked from him to Jen and back again. “Eddie, there’s so much—”

“Don’t.” He raised a finger to her lips. “Don’t explain. Don’t make excuses.” He ran a hand through his hair and tried to calm his pounding heart.

“It’s just that—”

He kissed her before she could finish, and his last words escaped inside her mouth. “I’ll wait, Ash. Okay? For you, I’ll wait.”

Chapter Sixteen

Ash slept late the next day. She pushed her face under the pillows, trying to ignore the morning sun that streamed through her curtains. Finally, sometime around noon, Jen knocked on her door.

“Ash? You alive in there?”

Alive…

She rolled over. One hand came up to her throat, and she wondered whether Eddie’s mouth had left a mark there, a deep strawberry of passion that she could still feel clear down to her toes.

I don’t know the last time I felt this alive.

“Yeah,” she croaked. “Come on in.”

Jen pushed open the door and eased inside. Damp hair swung against her cheeks, and she smelled like soap and shampoo. Her eyes gleamed as she leaned against Ash’s dresser.

“So,” she began.

Ash pushed herself up. She felt tired, pressed flat, ironed down to little bits of nothing. Though she’d slept for nearly nine hours, her dreams had bounced around, little flickers of Eddie and Colin and her father on the edges of her subconscious. She yawned and drew her hair back from her face.

“Does he kiss as well as he pours tequila shots?”

Her cheeks flamed again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why the hell not?”

Ash shrugged