I’d been curled up around the guy for at least a half hour before I could no longer keep from running my hands under his T-shirt and into his boxer briefs. He sucked in a breath and pushed his cock into my hand.
“Lie back,” I whispered.
He turned on his back and looked up at me, a purple lock of hair falling across his face. His dark eyelashes were beautiful and set off the varied colors of his eyes.
“And here I thought your sister was the most beautiful person I’d ever met,” I murmured before leaning in to brush a kiss across his nose, across the flat of his cheekbone, down the side of his jaw. I took a moment to strip his shirt and underwear off before returning to where I’d left off.
I trailed soft presses of my lips down the length of a coiled snake on his chest, across the brushstrokes of random script, and down again along a tattooed image of rosary beads until I came to the top of his trimmed pubic hair. My eyes came up to gaze at him while my tongue snuck out to search for that velvet skin I was hungry for.
Nico’s face was intense as he watched me wet my lips and draw them up and down his shaft. While I worked to increase his pleasure, he watched me silently as if studying something perplexing and unchartered. His pulse jumped on his neck as his climax raced in. His eyes widened and nostrils flared. His breathing was erratic and heavy. The cock against my tongue was heavy and throbbing, and I did my best to wrap my tongue around it to pull the orgasm from him by force if need be. I wanted to see him lose his composure, lose whatever was keeping him tied up in knots.
I wanted to see him let go.
He came with a shout that, thankfully, I saw coming just in time to stretch up and slam a pillow over his face. My intention was to keep his shout from waking the baby, but I realized a second later that I’d basically slapped him in the face just as he was getting ready to experience the heady escape of his release.
When he finished coming all over his chest and stomach, I gave him a few final strokes and licks until he caught his breath and yanked the pillow away.
Twin beams of annoyance glared at me from his flushed face. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Um. Sorry about that,” I said with a wince. “I didn’t want to wake Pippa.”
“Yeah, I get that, but a nice gentle hand would have done the trick. Or even a goddamned ball gag would have been kinder. You almost suffocated me.”
I climbed up to kiss him on his mouth and spent the next several minutes trying to make him forget about the damned pillow.
After the kissing, we lay there entwined together, his fingers moving in lazy shapes under my shirt along the skin of my back, when he spoke.
“It wasn’t just the thing that happened at the movie theater,” he said into the quiet room. “It was something that happened a few weeks later, at the lake.”
I tried to lift my head up to look at him, but he moved his hand into my hair to stop me. After I settled back on his chest, I asked him something I’d always wondered.
“When Reeve dumped you overboard?”
“When I fell off the boat,” he corrected. “Like an asshole.”
“You didn’t fall. You were knocked into the water by that jackass on purpose.”
I felt Nico’s hand stop its movement on my back. “How did you know that?”
“Because you wouldn’t have fallen otherwise. I hardly think you would have stood up unless you thought he was slowing down or stopping.”
“Maybe I was the idiot everyone claimed me to be,” he said. His voice was so defiant I laughed.
“You weren’t. You grew up in Hobie. No way did you stand up to move around a boat without knowing exactly what you were doing. Plus I knew Reeve Billingham and he was an ass. Still is, if rumors are to be believed.”
Nico let out a deep sigh. “Yeah, they were both assholes. I have no idea why Curt still has a problem with me after all these years.”
I had an idea, but I chose to keep my thoughts to myself. Nothing good would come of telling Nico any of it.
“He’s a jerk. Stay away from him, Nico, okay?”
He shifted out from under me and sat up, moving to sit against the headboard so he could look at me.
“What are you not telling me?”
“I’m just saying—”
“Yeah, West. I hear what you’re saying. What I don’t hear is what you’re not saying. Tell me.”
I sat up too, sliding back until I was sitting against the headboard next to him. “He has a shit ton of attitude toward your mother for what happened to his dad,” I told him. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was true nonetheless.