I smiled, enjoying being inspected and explored. I wanted her to know my body. Know what was inside my heart and soul.
Then she poked my right pec. “Is that even natural?”
I laughed. “You’re the doctor.”
She tipped her head back. “I guess I am. My diagnosis is that you’re an excellent physical specimen.”
“Back at you.” I snaked my hand down her back and grabbed her arse.
She winced. “Excuse my granny knickers.”
“They didn’t even hit my radar.” The only thing I was interested in was her. “It’s not the knickers that have my attention.”
Her eyelashes fluttered as if she were blinking away rain. “You know you’re ridiculously smooth, right?”
“But you know that I mean it, right?”
She reached up around my neck and I lifted her up, pulled her legs around my waist, and walked us into the bedroom. She stopped our progress with a hand on the doorframe. “Joshua, my forcefield is down,” she said, her eyes lined in silver. “I’m not pretending anymore. I can’t wake up tomorrow and pretend tonight never happened.”
Relief flooded through me and I closed my eyes, trying to focus on what she’d said.
“I can’t be a Miss Tuesday Night.”
“There is no Miss Tuesday Night. Not for months now. Not since . . . you.” I hadn’t made a conscious decision not to see Kelly or any of my other regular partners. Having Hartford in my life had filled the holes so completely, there was no room left for any other woman. It had just taken me a while to accept how I felt. “And I don’t want to pretend this didn’t happen.”
She trailed her fingers to the back of my neck and I lost all sense of reason. As we lay on the bed I caged her with my arms, wanting to take her in.
Over the last couple of months, this woman beneath me seemed to have coaxed me out of a shell I didn’t know I was living in. Every day since she moved in, I couldn’t wait to get home. To her. To hear about her day, to watch as she’d carefully take a slice of cake, to enjoy her teasing and her complete lack of pretention, to revel in her kindness and the way everything was just so easy between us.
There was no denying it. I had fallen for Hartford. Pretending otherwise was pointless.
She slid her hands down my sides. “You okay?” she asked.
I nodded. “Just thinking.”
“We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
I swept her hair from her face. How could she think I would want to back out? “I want to. I want to more than it’s possible to explain.” I wasn’t sure I’d ever wanted anyone more. The dates and the kissing had started as something else for her. Even when we’d slept together that first time, we’d agreed it wasn’t real. Not irreversible. Now it was different for her. And me.
I unfastened my trousers and kicked them off then knelt back over her, trailing kisses down her throat, licking and sucking and enjoying the taste of her warm, soft skin against mine. She sighed, her body sinking into the mattress. I pulled down the straps of her bra and flicked her nipples with my tongue, bringing them to tantalizingly sharp points. I grazed my teeth over them, and at her moan, a chill of satisfaction snaked down my spine.
I was going to make her come so hard.
I moved lower and stripped off her knickers in one swift movement. She twisted away from me. “Don’t you dare,” I said, grabbing her thighs and pushing them apart. “I want to taste you.”
“Joshua,” she said, her legs relaxing.
I reached between her legs and slid my fingers into her folds, finding her deliciously wet. “This was what I was looking for,” I said. I pushed into her silky softness, blinking my eyes shut to try to keep out how good it felt.
How very right and perfect everything about this moment was.
Twenty-Eight
Hartford
Joshua Luca is going down on me.
I was trying to pull myself out of the moment to retain some kind of control over my mind and body, but it wasn’t happening. Joshua’s insistent tongue was working overtime. His hands were everywhere. When we had slept together the first time, I must have shut a part of myself off, scared of falling too hard, too fast. Now all my senses were on max.
His body was like nothing I studied in anatomy and like everything I’d seen in the pictures in the National Gallery. His muscled back, arms, and shoulders rippled under my fingers like Samson in the painting I’d seen by Rubens. Except I was no Delilah. It was Joshua that had robbed me of all my senses and power, not the other way around.
“You’re fucking delicious,” Joshua said as he looked up at me from between my legs, his fingers still dipping and pushing and driving me wild.