His lips keep tasting, hot, exploring, friendly, and also intimate. He trails his lips downward to my neck, and tugs down my shirt a bit, to kiss the top crest of one of my breasts.
He then kisses his way to my earlobe, and when I turn my head to bite on his earlobe, he groans into my ear—he sounds tormented—and he eases back to just smile at me. Smile at me as if he’s happy just to be kissing me tonight.
I can’t even smile back. What is wrong with me?
He’s turned my body into a firestorm.
I grab him, and my hands go up his back, over the exact spot where I know he has his phoenix tattoo. Then I take the back of his head and draw him back to me.
Our kisses get wilder, my control dangerously close to nonexistent.
We’re burning and fevered and then there’s no more talking. No more playing. No more training. No more anything but heat and Maverick Cage’s mouth.
Fitting perfectly on mine.
His hands rubbing up and down my back, restless. I want them to go other places. I want those big calloused hands on my breasts, between my legs, on my bare skin.
And this mouth, this mouth—I want it on every inch.
My body is on fire for Maverick.
I hurt so much I want to cry. I want his every secret, his every dream, and I want to be in one of those dreams; I want to be one of those secrets.
Soon I’m going to be in my room, alone. Alone and Maverickless.
All the nights I’ve been remembering what it was like in his bed . . . all the nights trying to do the right thing—the thing that’s right for my head and feels so wrong for the rest of me—are coming to a near boil.
He stops kissing me and stares down into my face. Maverick’s eyes have a new, possessive glimmer. Still shielding me with his body, he gives me a firm peck on the lips again. My tongue flashes out greedily, and he smiles down at me, his eyes burning with hunger and happiness.
“It’s as hard to keep my hands off you as it is to keep from looking at you,” he whispers.
Touch me, see me. . . . I want to beg, but I’m so out of control that it takes every ounce of me to be quiet. Instead I wrap both my arms around his neck and I breathe in the scent of his warm skin.
I want you, Maverick Cage. . . .
I bury my lips against his throat, and as I peer past his shoulder, I recognize the passing scenery and I realize we’re almost a block away from my hotel.
He groans as he forces his mouth away from roaming over my temple.
God.
I think about the fact that our kisses nearly pushed him over the edge.
When will we be alone again?
Will we ever be alone again?
“Maverick . . .”
He laughs softly to himself and rests his head against mine, his intimate stare only confirming that he knows that I recklessly wanted to do more. I feel my ears start to get red.
I glance at Oz, and thank god he’s facing the window, snoozing as he listens to the music.
Maverick watches me run my fingers down my hair.
I look back at him. His eyes are absolute flames and I want to tear his clothes off and memorize every hot, hard inch of him.
He makes me so reckless, I don’t know this girl. I like it, but I’m afraid of it too. “I want to spend the whole night with you. I want to know what it’s like to lie on your chest. And talk about things.”
God. I don’t know why I said that, but I blurted it out. I force myself not to take it back. To own it.
We stare at each other as the cab slides to a stop in the hotel driveway.
Maverick helps me out, then leans toward the cabbie. “I’m walking her up, stay put.”
“Keeping the meter running,” the cabbie says.
Maverick nods and shuts the door behind us. His fingers press into the small of my back as he leads me across the lobby, pushes the Up button, and we wait for an elevator. When it tings and a couple shuffles out, he steps inside with me. And then we ride, all alone, to the penthouse.
He takes my hand in silence, dipping his thumb into my palm and staring down at me in smoldering male satisfaction.
“I should be embarrassed. I’m never this reckless,” I admit.
“Good. But I want you to be reckless with me.”
I laugh and duck my head, really embarrassed now. There are lights above us, and they feel brighter than usual after the shadows of the cab, and I’m utterly mortified.
“You know who I am. And I know who you are, Reese. And none of it has to do with what you said just now, or with who our fathers are.”
He pulls me so close that I can feel what our make-out in the cab has done to him, and his lips cover mine again, softer now, achingly soft.
A feather of pleasure ripples down my back as he shifts me and we end up flat against the wall. I’m sandwiched between the elevator wall and tons of Maverick.
We’re so hungry for each other that we can’t get our mouths off the other.
“You make me drunk, Maverick,” I say worriedly, as we kiss.
“I take it”—he frowns—“that’s a bad thing?”
I search his face. “I don’t know.”
“You make me want to go all out, Reese. Do everything.”