“Nicholas Rixey, did you just . . . smack me?” The sounds of the mattress accepting her weight and the covers shifting followed her into the bed.
He lay down on the very edge, his mind still spinning on the fact that he’d just spanked her, when a new realization hit home. Shit, I’m in bed with Becca. “Why, did you like it?” he said, forcing nonchalance into his voice when he felt anything but.
Her non-answer was a real kick in the ass, because he’d bet his right nut she was laying over there debating how to answer. And now his cock wanted back in the game. Fuck.
Yes, please.
Jesus, when your brain started talking to your cock, you were on some fucking really thin ice. “And don’t call me Nicholas,” he groused.
She chuckled and shifted positions, judging by the movement of the mattress.
“Lying on your back can’t be much better than lying on your stomach.”
He grunted, but it was true. But if he rolled on his right side, he’d be that much closer to her, and right now he swore she must be throwing off solar heat, he felt her presence so intensely.
“Nick?”
He tensed, unsure what the hell she was going to come at him with next. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Oh. The tension ebbed out of him. “You’re welcome.”
Gingerly, he turned onto his side, easing his back and restoring the relief she’d given to him with the gift of her touch.
“Nick?”
“Hmm?”
“I feel like I’ve known you a lot longer than a few days.”
So do I. But nothing good would come from making that admission. “Becca?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s time to stop talking now.”
She laughed, the sound warm and sunny in the darkness. The metaphor wasn’t lost on him.
Becca was the light to his dark.
Her honesty, her touch, her very presence settled a blanket of comfort around him like nothing else had this past year. And he wanted to wrap himself up in it and never let go. How the hell that worked without her getting hurt at his hands, without his bitterness and anger weighing her down, he didn’t know.
And he wasn’t sure it was good for either of them for him to figure it out.
Chapter 15
The warm weight was the first thing Becca noticed. All along her side, on her shoulder, covering her thigh. She didn’t want to open her eyes and chase away the dream of lying so close to Nick, because there was no way it was real.
Except the more she woke up, the more she realized she wasn’t imagining it. His jeans, his skin, his heartbeat all truly pressed against her. Sometime during the night, Nick Rixey had made himself into a blanket, and she was the beneficiary of his covering heat.
Judging by the numbness of her arm, his head had been resting on her shoulder for a while. She turned her face toward him and her cheek found the soft unruliness of his hair. A smile crept over her face. Here he’d insisted on clinging to the edge of the mattress when they’d gotten in bed, but he’d sought her out in his sleep and curled up against her.
And curled up was the right way to describe it. His head on her shoulder, his leg over her thigh, his arm stretched over her stomach and his big hand tucked under her hip. Like he wanted to make sure she didn’t go anywhere.
It was actually kinda sweet. Not at all a description she’d usually apply to Nick, with all his rough edges and gruff moods and serious intensity.
Opening her eyes to the gray light of early morning skirting in around the blinds, Becca soaked in the amazing image of Nick’s body sprawled all over hers. Man, that gave her some ideas she wouldn’t mind bringing to reality. Him, over her, moving, taking, claiming.
The way she wanted him was crazy. She knew it was. After all, she’d only known him a few days. But that didn’t make it any less real. At twenty-eight, she’d never felt anything like the passionate urges he seemed to wring out of her with just a look or a touch, and who knew if she’d find another man capable of making her feel this way again. He was quintessentially masculine and quietly powerful and arrogantly commanding—sometimes to the point where she wanted to throttle him. But mostly, her body reacted to these qualities as if they were a gypsy healer’s most potent aphrodisiac, mysterious and irresistible and maybe a little dangerous, too.
Becca rubbed her hand over her face, hoping the coolness of her palm might ease the sudden heat flooding her cheeks, not to mention elsewhere. It was no use, though, because as long as this much of him was touching this much of her, desire and lust would rush through her until she was nearly mad with the aching need for him to fill her up in any and every way he could.