Nico giggled right along with them. I’d noticed at least an hour ago that he was comfortably shit-faced. I wasn’t quite there, but I was heavily buzzed and couldn’t stop imagining Nico naked. Just the thought of it made me suck in a breath.
“What?” he asked.
“What, what?”
“You gasped.”
“So?”
Nico giggled again. “So I want to know why.”
I couldn’t tell him the real reason. “I can’t stop imagining you naked.”
Well, fuck.
More giggling. My eyes stayed riveted to the shining rings in his lower lip as we entered the bunkhouse to the big, vaulted common area.
“Kiss me,” I suggested.
Nico’s eyes widened, and he went from giggly to angry in a flash. He looked over at Griff, who was looking around the room in open-eyed wonder. “Don’t you fucking dare,” Nico told Griff.
“What?” Griff and I asked at the same time.
“Don’t do it, Griffin,” Nico repeated. His forehead was furrowed angrily. I had no idea what he was upset about, but it didn’t really matter. It was impossible to take him seriously when he was that stinking cute.
“Do what?” Griff asked in confusion.
“Kiss him!” he shouted.
All the Wildes who’d been lounging around the common area stopped talking and turned to see what the hell was going on. Nico’s words must have sunk in because within moments, a chant began somewhere, and then all those fuckers were chanting in sync. “Kiss him, kiss him, kiss him!”
Nico’s eyes widened even more as he realized what he’d started. “No!” He turned to me in horror. “You can’t kiss him.”
He looked panicked, and I suddenly put two and two together. Nico thought I’d been referring to kissing Griff. He really was drunk.
I stepped forward and took Nico’s face in my hands, leaning close until our foreheads were pressed together.
“Nicolas Salerno, there is no one within a thousand-mile radius I want to kiss besides you,” I said in a low voice.
Nico whimpered and leaned into me, hooking his fingers through the belt loops on my jeans.
The chants started up again, this time louder. I was pretty sure no one in my family had ever seen me kiss another person before, but I was too far gone to care. I leaned in and kissed him like his mouth had been made for mine.
And in that moment I was pretty sure it was.
Not long after we settled into the bed in one of the rooms, Nico climbed on top of me and began seducing me with lazy kisses all over my body. The slow, tender way we touched and teased was something new and raw between us. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was the relief of knowing Pippa was okay and we could be together without worrying about her for one night. Regardless of the reason, it was a kind of lovemaking I’d never known before.
Our eyes stayed riveted on each other as we moved together, and even when we came, our eyes never strayed. Something changed between us that night, and I knew we were no longer just hooking up. Even if Nico thought what we were doing was just sex, I knew the truth.
I was falling in love with him. As his departure hurdled toward us at breakneck speed, it was only a matter of time before my heart was crushed in the wreckage.
I woke up hard as a rock in an unfamiliar room tangled with a wonderfully familiar body. Nico’s legs were pretzeled with mine, and our fingers were intertwined where I held his hand on my chest. My heart immediately started its stupid flippy-floppy Nico routine, and I almost groaned at the cliché of it all.
I pulled his hand up to press it to my lips. The warmth of his skin and the smell of him hardened my cock even further. Nico shifted and leaned into me, sliding his head from the pillow onto my shoulder. The move must have woken him up because he made a small noise of complaint and winced.
“Good morning,” I said, turning to run the fingers of my free hand through his purple mane.
“No.”
“Yes. Any morning I wake up next to a hot, naked man is definitely a good morning,” I countered.
“I’m not naked,” he mumbled without moving.
“Not yet, but we can change that right this second,” I said, shifting my fingers to the waistband of his underwear.
He shoved his morning wood against my thigh. “If I thought I could move without my brain or stomach exploding, I’d totally strip down and beg you for it.”
“What if you just stay still and let me suck you off?”
Please, oh, please let him agree to my suggestion.
“Has anyone ever said no to that in the history of ever?” Nico asked. “Let’s be real.”
I carefully slid out from under him and settled his head on the pillow, pulling his hips around so he was lying flat on his back. A slice of morning sun cut through the gap between the curtains and fell across the side of his face and chest.