The Love Experiment (Stubborn Hearts 1)

“Do I look like I care?” He sat on the bed and cataloged her body.

There was zero doubt in her head he liked what he saw. That confidence boost got her to the bathroom, where she found a fresh towel on the closed toilet lid. She peed, washed up and cleaned her teeth. It wasn’t the middle of the night anymore. Ding ding, it was round two.

“My turn,” she said, coming back into the bedroom, super conscious of the way her breasts swayed and swelled with her breath.

Jack rolled to his back and held the covers up. “Have at me, sweetheart.”

“How much control are you prepared to give up for me?”

“How much control do you want?”

“All of it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What’s my lesson?”

“Your lesson?”

“When I fight it’s always about redemption in one form or another. It’s always about working out my feelings for something that doesn’t sit right. When I fought after doing wrong by you, I was trying to learn humility and to be as generous as you are.”

“You fought because you didn’t like what happened between us?” She frowned, uncertain, unhappy about that. She crawled onto the bed. What did he need from her? Sex, it was in his eyes and the gravelly nature of his voice. It was in the response of his body. What else? What was Jack Haley missing in his life?

“Your lesson is love.”

He grinned and made a grab for her. He thought she was joking, making a point like he had on the stairs—I love you is a cliché. She pushed him off. “No, my lesson, my control.”

He dropped his hands, he still didn’t get it, but not every lesson took first time. She’d love Jack with her whole self and she’d worry later about why she wanted that so much more than the purely sexual experience.

He was going to make it easy for her—he was hard, and on the top of the bedside table was the square of a condom wrapper. He was going to make it difficult, because she wanted to go slow but her body was ready for fast. She knelt at his side to avoid the temptation and took his jaw in her hands.

“Your eye looks better.” She traced the outline of the yellowing bruise with her finger and he closed both eyes. She shifted forward to string kisses along the unbroken brow and then more gently across the one that’d been split.

“I can smell you, us,” he said, a hand caressing her hip. She stiffened, a good-girl response. “I love the way you smell.”

She parted her knees, a better response, and watched his chest rise on a deep inhale. He made her feel like a femme fatale out of a sexy movie. She took her kisses to his jaw and his throat and her hands to his chest, stroking thick muscle and the light fur he had over his pecs. He groaned and brought a knee up when she trailed a hand down his chest and sternum and rested it on his stomach.

Jack hissed but not from pain, she hoped, when she flickered her tongue inside his belly button and then put her lips gently, gently to the bruise that extended from just under his ribs to the middle of his hipbone. She leaned over him, pressed her breasts against his side, her hair trailing across his chest and her closed hand over his erection.

“Derelie,” he said in warning, and it caused a fluttery thrill to settle in her abdomen. “Where are you going with this?”

“Only nice places. Trust me.”

“Trust you. You do know trust isn’t high on my capabilities list.”

Of course it wasn’t. His parents weren’t there for him, he spent his days writing about the way people were taken advantage of, and there was a puckered divot in his thigh from where he’d been shot with a dart gun. She played her fingers over that divot and then her lips.

“Hey, all the action is back up here.”

“Love means having to wait.”

“Love sucks.”

She laughed. “Not yet it doesn’t.”

His hands came off the bed and she shook her head, stopping him from grabbing her. He groaned like he was in pain. “Not the feet, okay? I don’t like having my feet touched.”

“Not the feet,” she replied, glad he’d given her that guidance.

She examined his knees and his shins, she moved to straddle his legs, and other than that one time she’d wrapped her hand around him, she avoided touching his cock. She would. She wanted to see his eyes go half-mast, she wanted to feel his hands on her unable to help himself.