What do I want to know? It barely seems important at this moment, because my whole body is on fire and telling my mind to shut the hell up for a while.
“Um… how old are you?”
He moves his lips across my neck, directing his attention to the other side, and some stupid sound escapes me.
“Older than I look.” His answer is dry and vague, which does nothing to help me, but he finally says, “Twenty-three?”
Why does it sound like a question? Then again, I’m incredibly distracted. Besides, he looks about that age.
“Where… um… were you born?”
He pauses his kissing assault, and I don’t know whether to breathe in relief or demand that he continue.
“You need to know this stuff?” he asks, rising up with a wry grin on his perfect lips as he stares down at me with those honey eyes. “Because I expected more in-depth questions. But for your information, I was born in Ireland.”
Ireland? “You don’t have an accent,” I point out, questioning how honest he’s being. “And you don’t look Irish.”
He laughs at me. Again. I’m apparently a source of constant amusement.
“I trained myself to speak without it a long time ago. Besides, I didn’t live there for too long. And what exactly do Irish people look like?”
He pins me with a gaze that dares me to say something he can mock me for, so I bypass that question before I say something that is stereotyping and stupid. It’s probably good he doesn’t have that accent, since I doubt I’d be able to turn him down at all then.
“Why do you like me?” There’s an in-depth question that I need answered.
He studies me very intently for several long minutes, his gaze shifting from my mouth to my eyes a couple of times.
“I should probably say something cheesy and romantic right about now, like how I’ve never met any girl like you, but I’ve always been bigger on being honest when I could.”
That has my ego deflating quickly. Lying under him, feeling his desire wrapped around me, for some reason I was starting to feel a little special.
“What’s the honest reason?” I ask unsurely.
He brushes his lips against mine, tugging it between his teeth, and he grinds against me again. Before I know it, the chaste touch turns into a fiery kiss, and I lose myself in him, forgetting the whole I-need-to-get-to-know you thing.
His tongue dances with mine as though we’ve always kissed like this, and he pulls me as close to his shirtless body as he can manage. His skin is so smooth and tightly stretched over the hard lines of muscle. I swear he’s built like a completely new specimen of the human race. And I stupidly shattered the illusion by asking him why he liked me.
“Because,” he says, pulling back and breathing a little hard, dragging his lips away from mine completely as though he can’t stop kissing me if he stays too close, “Well, I don’t know. You’re beautiful, but I’ve known plenty of beautiful girls. You’re sweet—even though you don’t like to admit it—but I’ve met sweet girls before. I’ve met bashful girls who blush when they see me, girls whose heartbeats pick up the second they hear my voice, and girls who act speechless. But I swear there’s something about you that has me scrambling to get closer. And I can’t seem to shut off this switch you flipped on the second I saw you. And I don’t want to.”
That really is honest. It’s hard decide whether I like that answer or not. Then again, I’m not stupid enough to think I’m unique in any way, but it’s nice knowing that he doesn’t want to stay away from me.
“How often does someone… flip your switch?”
His grin curls back up, and he thumbs my bottom lip. “That’s the thing that has me chasing you, sweet girl. Never. Not like this. So now I want to know why you’ve done this to me,” he says before dipping his head and kissing my neck again. Now that has my smile growing.
“Coffee is ready,” one of the girls—I think Ella—calls out from the other side of the door.
Thad smiles bigger before standing up, tugging my shirt back into place, and he walks out of the room as though he’s been expecting that announcement. A few garbled conversations muddle together, making no sense to me from in here.
“Cream and sugar?” Thad calls.
I assume he’s talking to me so I answer, “Nothing in mine.”
Then Thad is suddenly back in the doorway with two steaming cups.
“My kind of girl,” he says with that perfect smile still intact.
Sitting up, I brush my hair away from my face, wishing I didn’t look like I just crawled out of bed. I’m still not sure how I fell asleep here to begin with.