“Hurry up,” he hissed.
Did his voice sound huskier? Was I imagining that?
I swallowed hard. “Do you want to stare at an ugly scar for the rest of your life because you were impatient?”
“I have a beard, honey,” he replied. “And the way I feel like I’m dying right now? I don’t think that I’ll ever look at that scar and regret anything if it got me you faster.”
I felt my breath hitch.
Then I hurried about as fast as I was willing, seeing as I was putting stitches into a body for the first time.
To make it worse, I was kind of enjoying myself, despite the circumstances.
Mending skin was a whole lot like joining two pieces of metal—at least skill-wise. It took a steady hand and a lot of concentration.
With his careful tutelage, I was mending the small gash with a needle and thread, and not finding it the least bit disgusting like I’d thought I would.
“What do I do with these ends?” I questioned as I came to the end.
He carefully explained what to do, and I followed his directions to a T.
“You’re good at this,” he murmured a few seconds later as he checked out my handiwork in the mirror. “Like, no joke, I think you could find a new calling putting sutures in people if you ever wanted to. I’ve seen only three better in my life, and all of them were heart surgeons. And this is your first time ever doing this.”
Pleasure at his words made me feel heat wash over my face, but before I could focus too much on the way his words made me feel, he was shifting me.
Seconds later, I found myself bent over the exam table with his big body pressing into mine.
I gasped at the sudden change in orientation.
“What are you…” I started to say, but before I could get much more than three words out, my voice trailed off, and I was left thinking about other things.
Things that had to do with certain appendages connected to a body that I’d done nothing but ogle for the longest of times.
I turned my head to say something, I wasn’t sure what, when his mouth slammed down on mine.
We both hissed in pain, but neither one of us pulled back.
His hand slid into the back of my hair, almost as if he expected me to pull back, though, and he wanted to prevent it.
But joke was on him.
I wasn’t pulling back.
Not after spending the last half an hour hovering over his hard cock, and then pressed against it for the last five.
Nope.
I wasn’t stupid.
“This means nothing,” he rasped as he pulled back, both of our breaths coming in pants.
His eyes studied the side of my face, which just so happened to be where I could feel the bruise forming.
“This means less than nothing,” I agreed, wiggling so that I was more comfortable with his added weight pressing me to the table. “We’ll do this once…”
“And never do it again,” he finished my sentence. “A one-off. A temporary lapse in sanity.”
That’s when clothes started to fly.
Well, half of them anyway.
The top half.
The bottom half of our clothes stayed on, because it was too much trouble to get them off with having to take boots off, too.
I was allowed up to pull my shirt and bra off, and he allowed me to move just long enough that I could get my pants down to around my ankles.
He was shirtless and shoving the front half of his jeans down at the same time that he was pushing me down flat against the exam table.
The crinkle of the paper that they used to help sanitize the table scrunched underneath me, momentarily distracting me from what we were about to do.
I was so focused on that sound, and how horrible it was to be doing this here, that I didn’t prepare myself.
What would I prepare myself for?
How much I would like having Tide’s fingers pressed against me. Pressed inside of me. Pressed anywhere on my body, truthfully.
I’d allowed myself to hate Tide so long that I didn’t expect it.
To like anything that had to do with Tide Crow was downright foreign to me.
But his fingers didn’t feel foreign as he pressed them into me, one digit at a time, and tested my readiness.
“Fuck, you’re tight.” He paused as a thought occurred to him, as if whatever that thought was, he wasn’t going to cross that particular boundary. “You’ve had a dick in you before, right?”
Well…
“I’ve had dicks inside of me,” I grumbled.
Fake ones.
“Real ones?” he wondered, curling his fingers up in a way that he hit a completely new bundle of nerves inside of me.
Had he not been holding me down, I would’ve jolted straight off the exam table.
My eyes crossed, and the fact that he actually expected an answer was unreal to me.