She braced her forearms against his chest and pushed free, nearly tripping over his leg. No choreography here, just stumbling, clumsy desire, honest at last. At the very last, because she was getting what he’d taunted her with all summer, and then they were over.
He reached for her, his mouth forming words that disappeared into the red veiling her vision, the thunder obscuring her hearing. She stepped back into his body, put her hands on his hips, and pushed. He slid down the wall, dragging her with him until she landed on her knees, straddling his hips. Liquid saturated her jeans at her knees as she cupped the too-stark line of his jaw, obscured with blond-brown stubble, and kissed him, all the passion and intensity and desire going off like a bomb, white hot, intense, violent. The lack of finesse fueled her until she wanted to lay waste to him with kisses as flagrant and devastating as his lies. She pulled back, licked his lower lip, then his upper, felt his hands clench in her hair, holding but not pulling. She tossed her head from side to side to feel the sting in her scalp.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
She wrenched the front of his shirt and dragged her fist down, destroying hours of a tailor’s work as she went. Buttons pinged against the floor, the wall, the table to their left. When she reached his trousers she turned her wrist and cupped his erection. It pulsed against her palm, heft and heat through fine wool, and when she massaged, he lifted into her hand and groaned. But when she lifted her hands to smooth the ruined shirt fronts to the side, he gripped her wrists. “No.”
“Yes,” she said, searching his gaze. “Yes, Ryan. Here. Now.”
“If we do this now, you’ll hate me.” His eyes gleamed dark with a desperation and loss and an anguish she could hardly comprehend. It would take nothing to leave him in the same state as his shirt. “You’ll really hate me. Right now you just think I’m an asshole.”
“Right now there’s no other option,” she said, her voice rough with a desperation that matched the honest pain in his eyes. “You called me. You asked me to come to you.”
He drew in a ragged, chest-deep breath, but his gaze never left hers. “You weren’t supposed to happen this summer.”
“But I did happen.”
Thunder crashed over the house, rattled the windows, followed almost immediately by a lightning strike that lit up the room. The hair on Simone’s arms stood on end, crackling from electric charge, although whether from the near-miss or Ryan’s erection pressed against her, she didn’t know. The room went dark again, and rain lashed the windows like whip strikes.
“It’s time, Ryan.”
He buried his face in her throat, fisted his hands in her hair. “Jesus,” he said. She could barely hear him over the rain and thunder. “Jesus. I just need you here. I need you.”
She purposefully forced the tension from her body, then wrapped her arms around his head, cradling it against her shoulder, murmuring nonsense words, soothing him, her words a layer of chiffon over the dense dark velvet of lust. “Come upstairs with me,” she said.
The floor was strewn with the shards from his glass of whiskey. She looked down at her knees but her jeans were intact, just soaked with alcohol. She stepped clear of the spatter pattern, took his hand, and led him up the stairs. The first white, six-paneled door she opened had a rumpled king-size bed in it, and Ryan’s beach clothes tossed over a denim-covered wingback by the windows. Lily’s perfume lingered in the air.
Ryan reached past her and closed the door, then turned across the hall and opened the next one. The bed was neatly made in pristine white eyelet cotton, the air somehow tinged with disuse. Perfect. She led Ryan in and closed the door. When she relaxed her grip on his hand, he stopped beside the bed and looked down at her. Without a word she slid her palms up his chest and over his shoulders, easing his jacket down and off. She folded it neatly and draped it over the arm of the overstuffed chair in front of the window.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You’re wearing the wrong clothes,” she replied.