“I can feel it now.” He held his breath as her mouth moved toward his, almost close enough to kiss. “But you know what I really want to feel?”
She was going to feel his balls explode if she didn’t stop grinding her hips against his. “What do you want to feel?”
“I want to feel like you think I’m the sexiest woman in the world.”
“Honey, I do think that.”
“Show me.”
Ryan dug deep and came up with a tattered shred of self-control. “You’ve been drinking and there’s a good chance you’ll hate me in the morning.”
“I’m not sober, but I’m not drunk, either.” He must have looked unconvinced, because she laughed. “Want me to do a sobriety test? Bend over and touch my toes?”
“Honey, you bending over in that dress is the last thing I need. Say the alphabet backward or something.”
“Z. X? Can even sober people do that?”
“I don’t care.” He gave in to the temptation and cupped her breast, feeling her nipple harden under his thumb as he stroked it through the silky dress. “All I care about is you not regretting this in the morning.”
She kissed him, standing up on her tiptoes and wrapping her arms around his neck. Their breath mingled as she teased him, flicking her tongue over his bottom lip and chuckling when his entire body shuddered.
With a growl, he plunged a hand into her hair and held her head as he took control of the kiss. Her mouth was hot and sweet and he took his time tasting her. He could feel the urgent hunger in her body and the bite of her fingernails in his scalp, but he didn’t care. He’d waited a long damn time to kiss this woman and he kept on kissing her until she moaned against his mouth in surrender.
“I want you,” he whispered.
“Then turn off the car and come inside.”
He wasn’t sure he could walk that far. Not that it mattered. He’d crawl on his hands and knees to get to her if he had to.
She walked toward the house, being a smart-ass with her arms held out straight and placing each foot directly in front of the other. When she got to the steps, she turned and laughed.
With her eyes sparkling and her skin flushed from his kiss, she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
Then she stopped laughing, her gaze locked with his. “The way you’re looking at me right now makes me feel sexy. But if you’re going to stand there all night, I’m going to start without you.”
That got him moving. He shut off the car and used the walk between it and the front door to move a condom from his wallet to his front pocket. He only had one, so he had to make it count.
When he walked through her door, he found her in the living room. She’d slipped off the dress and stood there in nothing but two scraps of ivory lace.
She was, no question, the sexiest woman in the whole world and, by the time he was done with her, she was going to know without a doubt that he thought so.
*
The insecurities that had started creeping in as she stripped off the dress—she’d gained a little weight and there were a few stretch marks and, ohmigod, she wasn’t twenty anymore—evaporated the second Ryan stepped into the room and stopped moving.
The overpriced bra-and-panty set were worth every single penny as his gaze swept over her almost naked body. She knew every flaw was on display, but there was no cooling off in his look when he turned those sizzling blue eyes back to her face.
His naughty grin twisted her up inside. “I’d hate to disappoint you, like I did with the dancing, so maybe you should tell me if you’ve been thinking about this, too.”
“I’ve thought about this a lot.”
He started slowly toward her, unbuttoning his shirt as he walked. “When did you start thinking about it?”
“A long time ago. Years,” she confessed, feeling the heat of the blush across her exposed chest. “If I was stressed or wired or, for whatever reason, just couldn’t get my mind to shut off so I could go to sleep, I’d...you know...fantasize. About you. Us.”
“Thinking about having sex with me puts you to sleep?”
She would have laughed if he hadn’t looked honestly perplexed, and maybe a little wounded. “No, thinking about having sex with you distracted me from all the crap in my life, because it was intense and amazing and so perfect I could fall asleep to very, very happy thoughts.”
“So what you’re saying is you’ve built us up for so long in your head, I can’t possibly live up to your expectations.”
This time she did laugh. “You’ll just have to try a little harder.”
He yanked the shirt out of his waistband to undo the last couple of buttons, and she itched to slide her hands across the expanse of his chest.
Instead, he gently nudged her backward across the room until her back was against the wall, and she sucked in a sharp breath when he raised her arms above her head and pinned her wrists there with one hand.