A Firefighter in Her Stocking

“Are you real?” she asked, her voice catching. “You can’t be.”

“Real enough that I’m going to carry you to your bedroom and kiss you all over.”

“Okay,” she agreed, shivers covering her body at his words. “Hurry.”

He laughed and scooped her up.

“Oh!” she squealed. “You didn’t really have to carry me.”

“Afraid I’ll throw my back out and not be able to make good on my promise?”

“If you throw your back out then you just have to lie there. I’ll do the work and you can just...lie there.”

He groaned. A deep growl that came from low in his chest. “Sarah.”

“Jude,” she countered, wanting to say his name, to hear it on her lips. Jude. Her Jude. Hers.

Although Jude had never been inside her bedroom, he carried her straight there, laid her gently on her bed.

Staring up at him, Sarah waited on his next move.

“This is what you want? Once we do this, there’s no going back,” he reminded her yet again.

Was he kidding?

“I don’t want to go back. I want you.” To prove her point she reached for the shirt she wore and lifted the hem upward, glad when Jude helped pull the material free from her body, exposing the underwear her new BFF at the mall, Cher, had suggested.

She didn’t boast any phenomenal curves, but beneath Jude’s hot gaze Sarah felt sexy, beautiful, feminine.

“I’m almost afraid to touch you.”

“We’re going to have a major problem if you don’t get over that,” she warned, her eyes feasting on him.

“Noted.” He undid her pants, slid the material over her hips, down her thighs. He sucked in a breath when he took in the barely there black lace that didn’t begin to cover her bottom.

“Sarah,” he groaned, tossing the material onto her bedroom floor. “No granny panties for you.”

Heat rushed into her cheeks. Yep, she’d be sending Cher tickets to that concert she’d mentioned wanting to attend for having insisted Sarah buy underwear to go with her rapidly expanding new wardrobe.

“I feel as if I’ve waited for this forever.”

“You have.” Or maybe it was her who’d been waiting for this forever.

When he undid his pants, pulled them off and, rather than crawl into the bed beside her, instead tugged her around to where her bottom was at the edge of the bed, he lowered to kiss her throat, her chest, her belly, lower, yeah, Sarah was feeling forever.

Forever and ever and ever.

Oh, my.

CHAPTER TWELVE

JUDE WASN’T SURE how sexually inexperienced Sarah was, but she’d told him she’d never been kissed the way he’d kissed her that first time. So at best she’d had a less than pleasurable sexual encounter, but he suspected she’d not even done that.

Which was why he paced himself.

Because what he really wanted was to be inside her.

Deep inside her. Surrounded by her. Lost in her.