“I told him you licked it with a forked tongue.” She smirked, but I didn’t miss the shift in her breathing and the clench of her fingers on her legs.
Maybe she hated herself for enjoying our night together and would never remember it in a fond way. But I knew, I knew, she still wanted me as painfully as I wanted her. She was fighting it. The wounds I’d inflicted were too raw.
I could mend the damage. I would mend it.
Careful not to touch her, I bent over her folded frame until my chest hovered an inch from her knees. “I get that you’re pissed, but you know as well as I do there is nothing hotter or more intense than the way we fucked that night.”
Her head tilted to the side. “You’re a world-class dick.”
God, I wanted to kiss her sassy mouth. “And your soaking wet pussy loved me.”
Anger tightened her eyes with a quickness that told me that was the absolute worst thing to say.
Fuck. I was going about this the wrong way. Our connection wasn’t just a sexual one. There was an emotional current flowing through it, a searching kind of energy that fused on a level I didn’t comprehend.
I needed to stop thinking with my cock and do the brave thing. I needed to open up my insides. Let her have a good look around. Maybe I’d learn something, too, because right now, I was operating on gut and backbone, both of which belonged to a Neanderthal.
I shifted into her space, my eyes and face exposed for her scrutiny, and infused my voice with the sincerity of my words. “It was real, Kaci. I shut off the cameras before we removed our clothes, and everything that happened after was just you and me. No bullshit.”
“Fuck you.” The venom in her voice sliced through the tension, a contradiction to the softening of her pretty mouth and the wet sheen forming in her eyes.
I was really mucking this up. I didn’t know how to communicate what I didn’t understand. But my body knew. It shook with the urge to drag her to the floor, spread her beneath me, and show her exactly how I felt.
Use your words, dumbass.
I drew in a strengthening breath. “I don’t know what I’m saying here, knowing you’re married, and I don’t have a chance in hell.” I stuffed that miserable notion into a tiny corner where it couldn’t distract me. “But goddammit, Kaci, if you weren’t married, I’d fight for you.” I rubbed my face, felt my jaw hardening beneath my hand. “Fuck that. I’m fighting for you anyway.”
Eyes of fathomless blue studied me with a fierceness that said she was listening, that she very much wanted to believe me. But her voice lashed with angry suspicion. “You started a fight against me. How in the hell are you going to fight for me?”
I wasn’t in the habit of stealing other men’s wives. I wouldn’t fight Collin, not if she loved him. What then? What was I fighting for?
Searching her eyes, I looked past the confident glow she held at the surface and probed deep beyond the liquid blue. She stared back, seemingly content with letting me explore. I lost track of time, my bearings, and a part of my soul in the soundless intimacy of her gaze. When her arm lifted at the edge of my vision, the spell shivered.
The light touch of her hand on my cheek silenced my breaths. My heartbeat sped up. Sweat slicked my palms. And there, in the deepest reaches of her eyes and in the warmth of her hand on my face, I found what I was looking for.
It had been there all along, staring up at me in the elevator, reaching for me on the dance floor, wrapping around me in the hotel room, and right now, touching my face. Her loneliness fused into every cell of my body and made me want things I had no business wanting.
I moved my hands to the seat back behind her head. “I’m going to fight for your forgiveness.” I pressed my chest against her legs, pinning her knees between our bodies. “And I’m going to fight for your happiness.”
Wonderment illuminated from that lonely place behind her eyes, and a sad smile quivered at the corner of her mouth. She dropped her hand from my face and slid her legs out from between us, her feet lowering to the floor beside my knees. “Why?”
My pulse hammered wildly as I pushed her thighs to the side, keeping them together, and bent over her lap. “I don’t know how to tell you. I can only tell you what it feels like.” I grabbed her wrist and returned her palm to my face, holding it there.
She pulled on my grip, but I refused to let go as the sudden, desperate need for her to understand opened my mouth. “This is real. So real I feel it everywhere, like a million tiny vibrations under my skin. This…this urgency to protect you…” My breath burst in and out, and my voice thickened with the messy, unfiltered truth. “It’s a crazy need inside me, driving me to be near you, to watch over you, to undo the hurt I put in your eyes. I don’t fucking know what it is, but I feel it now, spinning me around—around you—and knocking me way the fuck off track.”