She slid out of the truck, crossing paths with Lucas in front of the truck as he went to open the garage. Duke trotted out of the screened-in porch and was waiting for her at the kitchen door, his front paws on the top step, his tail wagging. She let him in and gave him a dog biscuit. He settled under the kitchen table.
She walked down the hall, into the bedroom, where she set her glasses on the nightstand and draped her sweater over the end of the spindle bed. There was no point in emphasizing the cliché. Her T-shirt and jeans weren’t sexy, but they weren’t unattractive, either. For a long moment she debated where to stand, or sit, the sounds of Lucas unloading the truck, faint but purposeful. But when the tailgate clanged shut, she stripped back the chenille spread and top sheet, then scrambled onto the bed and sat in the middle, cross-legged. It was almost a relief not to have to figure out what someone else wanted. This was about what she wanted.
And Lucas didn’t seem to object to giving it to her. Lucas Ridgeway had lied to her. He’d said he wasn’t going to get hurt by their secret affair, but she wasn’t so sure.
His sneakers didn’t make much noise against the floors, but she could hear him approaching. He appeared in the doorway, all broad shoulders and lean hips in his T-shirt and jeans. She liked that he didn’t change, that he didn’t pretend to be anything other than what he was. He was unlike most of the other men of her acquaintance, who needed to establish who they were through words. They used volume, both sound and content, to create an outline of a man. They used degrees, dropped names, touched on all the high points—education, travel, connections, work—to paint a desirable picture. Lucas Ridgeway just was.
Her mouth went dry at the memory of his hard-muscled torso.
He didn’t close the door or speak as he took two steps into the room, put one knee onto the bed, then bore her back onto the mattress. It was a clean, unconscious move. Knee on the bed, left hand bracing his weight, his right arm coming around behind her shoulders to control her descent. She ended up flat on her back with him lying half on top of her, his knee sliding between hers. She inhaled breathily, and good thing, because when his mouth came down on top of hers, she forgot all about breathing.
He kissed her, lips soft but demanding as they slid against hers. Automatically she opened her mouth, but rather than his tongue she felt a smile against her lips. “Patience is a virtue,” he murmured, giving her vibrations when she wanted slick heat.
“I don’t feel very virtuous at the moment,” she said.
“This is a problem?”
“It’s . . .” He used the edge of his teeth along her jaw to the soft spot just under her ear. “It’s . . . different.”
“That was the goal, right? To be different.”
Never before in her life had a man explored the sensitive skin below her ear so thoroughly. She made a little noise, part desire, part assent, part plea, and felt an answering rumble of a chuckle deep in his chest.
“You said you had something in mind for my mouth.”
Heat swept through her, shock at her bold words blending with the arousal at hearing them repeated back to her. She arched under him. “This is good,” she said. “This is what I had in mind.”
Another chuckle. He straddled her and braced his weight on elbows and knees, trapping her without giving her the delicious pressure of his weight against her. He nipped at her earlobe, breathed a heated exhalation against her ear, then kissed his way back to her mouth.
This time his tongue rubbed against hers. She writhed under him, lifting until her breasts, then hips, brushed his hard torso, then subsided back against the bed. His mouth left hers to trace over her chin and down her arched throat to the hollow between her collarbones. Alana wrapped her fingers around his upper arms and dug in her nails as he kissed the skin not covered by the neck of her T-shirt, nuzzling it aside. Desperate for his touch, she reached down and peeled off her shirt. Without further prompting, he kissed and licked his way to the tops of her breasts, careful to lavish attention on exposed skin only.
The concept of a tease clarified in her mind. With a low moan she undulated under him as that wickedly talented mouth skipped over the front clasp of her bra to work over her ribs, then her stomach, exposed above the waistband of her jeans.
He lifted again, dropping another kiss on her mouth, and this time it was pure, hot desire. Slick and hot and wet, nearly carnal in its intensity. She slid her hands under his T-shirt and dug her fingernails into the ridge of muscle on either side of his spine.
“Easy,” he growled.
“Impossible,” she gasped in return.
His hair tumbled forward, tangling with his eyelashes as he surveyed her. “Take these down,” he said, using his chin to edge her bra straps toward her shoulders.
She removed her nails from his back and put her fingers to the front clasp.