The noise he made was somewhere between a laugh and a growl. He kissed her again, this time leaning the full weight of his body against hers, pinning her between the door and the ridges of his body. Hip bones. Cock. Ribs. The difference between the Ryan of the summer and this Ryan was profound, shocking. She wanted to leap over the railing onto the sidewalk, and laugh and shout for sheer, heart-stopping delight. She settled for fisting her left hand in his pullover to pull his mouth down to hers while she fumbled with the doorknob with the other. When she turned the knob they stumbled into the tiny foyer. Only Ryan’s strong grip kept her on her feet, but they still careened off one wall, then the other as they stumbled up the stairs.
She led him past the door to Irresistible’s showroom to the end of the hall, where an unmarked door led into her apartment at the rear of the building. The space was tiny, a living room just large enough for a couch and a wall full of bookshelves, a galley kitchen with a single stool at the end of the counter where she ate, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Her bed occupied virtually the entire floor space, with just enough room to maneuver to the closet and the bathroom. “It’s not much,” she said, uncertain of how he was handling his rapid descent into the ninety-nine percent.
He tossed the daisies on the nightstand. “I really couldn’t give less of a fuck,” he muttered, and jerked her sweater over her head, then cupped her frantic, flyaway hair to her ears and kissed her again. The ocean of her breathing and heartbeat echoed in her ears, reminding her of that hot August night months earlier. “Besides, it smells like you. Like warm silk and your skin.”
The word hung softly in the air. Compelled, she tugged his shirt free of his jeans and pulled it and his pullover over his head in one move, leaving the entire expanse of his shoulders, chest, and abdomen bared to her. He reached behind her and unhooked her bra.
She stood in front of him, her heart skittering in her chest, her breath coming shallow and soft in the silence. “If you give me a little warning, I’ll put on something more interesting than white satin,” she said.
“This isn’t about the lingerie. It’s about your skin,” he said, then kissed her shoulder and drew the bra down her arms to drop to the floor. “It’s actually about your freckles.”
She laughed until he put his mouth to her forehead, cheekbone, chin. He used his thumbs to tip her face up so he could kiss her throat, licking delicately at the notch between her collarbones as she smoothed her hands up his ribs, murmuring mine, mine as he went. Her hands rested on his waist, but moved of their own volition up his chest, her thumbs pressing into his breastbone, then splitting apart to trace his collarbone to his shoulders. Again and again her hands followed the same path, down his arms to his waist, up his abdomen and chest to his shoulders, absorbing the truth in his skin.
He wrapped his arm around her waist and bore her backward to the bed. “I’m going to kiss every single freckle on your body,” he said.
He put one knee between her legs and stretched out on top of her, groaning at the contact of her skin on his, and again when she skimmed her hands over his back to his bottom. She could feel his heart thumping in his chest as he kissed her, deep and heated, his hands cradling her skull while he rocked his hips against hers, wrapped an arm around her waist, tangled their legs together.
He kissed his way down her breastbone to her abdomen, his slow, measured pace driving her wild. “Perhaps you could catalog my freckles another day,” she said with a strangled gasp, and reached for his button fly. His legs were nothing but corded muscle under skin, and his feet, when she tugged off his jeans, socks, and shoes in one go, were covered in calluses and healing blisters. His erection pulsed as she looked at him.
“Now you,” he said, and unzipped her jeans and pushed them and her white silk panties down and off.
“Come in here,” he said, and covered them with the duvet. Cocooned in privacy, he kissed her, the pressure of his mouth alternately slow and intense, then rapacious and wet and demanding. She luxuriated in the full-body contact, sweat slicking their bellies, the hair on his legs rough against hers, the hard points of his hip bones pressing into her inner thighs. His hand stroked her throat, her belly, her sex, a possessive, primitive touch that continued when he rolled her over and kissed the bumps of her spine to her tailbone. She shuddered when he sprawled over her, gathered her hair away from her nape and nipped at the vulnerable skin there. Words vanished first, English, then French, then images she might later string together to remember what happened, until finally her brain dissolved into pure sensation. Smooth cotton against her nipples and belly, his hard cock against her back, thrusting slowly against her tailbone, one hand in her hair, the other arm under her hips, until she pushed up, letting cold air stream over their heated bodies.