Running Wild (Wild 3)

A wave of adrenaline rushes through as he lifts me off the wall and carries me toward my bed. But he stalls at the small wooden dining table, setting me on it. “Shit. Sorry.” He quickly sheds his shoes.

I couldn’t care less if my entire place was covered in Tyler’s muddy footprints.

My mouth goes dry as I trace the cut of his body, his jeans sitting low, exposing the sharp V at his hips.

His palms slide over my bare thighs. “Marie, when you look at me like that …” His words trail, his eyes wild as they search every inch of me.

I reach up to drag the soft pad of my thumb over his bottom lip. His mouth closes over it, his dark, heated stare locked on mine. The moment feels like the calm before an unyielding storm.

I welcome the storm, arching my back instinctively.

With a soft curse, his frantic lips land on mine again, his hands hooked around my thighs. I’m expecting him to carry me the rest of the way to my bed, but he tips me backward instead, until I’m splayed across my table and he’s guiding my panties off my hips and down my legs. His lips are a whisper against my ankle as he tosses the last of my clothing away.

“Tyler …” I whisper, my voice thick with need. I peer up at him and am treated to a crooked smirk, as if he knows how utterly consumed I am by him.

“I was waiting for you to say my name like that.” His gaze is molten as it touches me everywhere a second before his fingertips do, trailing the length of my body from my jaw down, over the swell of my breasts, along my rib cage, over my hip bones, between my legs. My body responds, undulating as he teases me with gentle but expert strokes.

And then he drops to his knees, fitting his shoulders between my thighs. His mouth takes over for his hands, and the sounds that escape me are raw and deep and uninhibited, my fingers grasping handfuls of his hair. The scratch of his soft stubble against sensitive flesh has me lifting my body into him, and words that I shouldn’t dare say yet cling to my tongue, ready to slip free.

A deep, heady pulse erupts in my spine, sending my body into a wave of euphoria.

Somewhere in the hazy moments right after, I hear him shucking his jeans, and then he’s standing before me, giving me my first uninhibited view of his body. I admire his size as he lines his powerful thighs up with mine, his palms hot and forceful as they seize my hips.

Only when he pushes into me, when my body stretches around him, welcoming him, and his hips are already moving, do I finally remember.

“Wait.” My God. Why can’t I seem to think straight when I’m with him? “Did you bring anything with you?” The only condoms in my drawer are surely expired.

“It’s a bit late for that, isn’t it?”

If diseases were the concern, yes. I hesitate, not wanting to ruin the moment. “I’m not on any birth control.”

His hips stall, his focus drifting from my face down to our current predicament.

I search for a hint of annoyance in Tyler’s expression, but I see only curiosity. “There was no risk the last time.” Unlike Vicki, I’ve always been aware of my cycle and able to tell the signs. “I haven’t been on it in years.” All the Lehr women have struggled with hampering side effects. I relied on an IUD while I was with Jonathan, but never replaced it with a new one when the old one was removed. There was no need.

“And now?”

“It’s pretty risky,” I admit sheepishly.

His mood is unreadable as he studies my face for a long moment, his chest heaving with shallow breaths.

And then he leans down to kiss me again, his lips supple and affectionate as they pry mine open. I prepare for him to slip out, but instead he whispers, “Do you want me to stop?”

“Well, no.” I laugh, my hands smoothing over his jaw, the moment oddly intimate, even on my dining table. “I never want you to stop this.” If I can feel like this every day for the rest of my life, I’d die happy.

His lips catch the corner of mine in a teasing caress.

And then his hips start moving again, a slow grind.

“Tyler.” My warning is weak as my hips curl into him.

“I can pull out right before.”

I chuckle. “And if that foolproof method doesn’t work?”

He sets his forehead against mine. “Then it doesn’t work.”

I push his face back to get a good look, to make sure I understand him, and make sure he understood me.

He seems to be searching for the same answer in mine. “Tell me that’s not what you want, Marie. Tell me you don’t want that with me.” Vulnerability shines in his gaze.