Before I could say anything else, he put his hand over my mouth and shook his head. “I’ll take it from here. I’m thinking what you mean is that removing that barrier moves our relationship into a more long-lasting one and makes it deeper because of that. Am I right?” Not moving the hand away, he waited for me to nod my head and then lifted it up. “Thought so. Baby, you have to know that this between us is something I’ve never had before and is definitely something I don’t want to lose.”
“Well I do now.”
His lips twitched when I whispered that to him, but he quickly went back to being serious. “I can promise you that I want to keep growing what we’ve started. I don’t want to go back to a life that doesn’t have you in it, so any chance I get to make it deeper, stronger, whatever, I’m going to do it.”
Tilting my head to the side, I rubbed my thumb across the lines on his forehead where he was frowning. “Even if it means getting ‘Lottie’s bitch’ tattooed on your forehead?”
“Even if it means getting that tattooed on my forehead,” he chuckled. “So long as you get ‘Levi’s my master’ tattooed on yours.”
Pretending to think it over, I shook my head. “They might think I mean the jeans.”
Dropping down to his back beside me, he scrubbed his face with his hands. “I hate that they told you that.”
This time, it was me leaning on an arm and looking down at him. “You can’t keep anything a secret, I’m afraid. The walls have eyes.”
Dropping his hands, he grinned up at me. “Wanna give them something to talk about? Maybe we can put them in therapy with position seventy-two.”
Holding a finger up, I reached behind me for my phone and opened up the messages. “One second, I’ve got an appointment to make with Parker.”
That made him sit up straight in bed, yanking the warm duvet off me at the same time as he lunged at me. “I’m getting you raw?”
The look on his face was so intense that my mind went blank. “Raw?”
“Without a condom, baby.”
It’s strange how something like removing a piece of latex can mean so much to someone, but the emotions on his face showed that it was in fact a huge deal. It was to me, but I hadn’t thought it would mean so much to him.
“Yeah.”
Leaning down to give me a kiss, he murmured against my lips, “Tell him to see me at the same time. I’ll get checked, you get covered, and then you’re all mine.”
Grinning, I typed out the request and set my phone down beside me. “What’s position seventy-two?”
He did better than describing it to me, he showed me. And just to say, if the walls did have eyes, I was never looking at any of them ever again.Chapter FourteenLeviFour days later…
Lottie was going out on Night Rider again while I rode along on an ATV with Archer’s dog Bogey.
Dad had a horse that was a cantankerous asshole, so Archer was going to ride him at the side of her. I wasn’t sure who I felt worse for – me or him.
It was no exaggeration that Bogey had death breath, and no matter what it just never got better. Archer had taken him to the vet, he’d had his teeth cleaned, he ate the chews to get rid of bad breath, he had a special diet… that dog was born to kill people with one exhale. Which was why he was going in the back of the vehicle.
“Now, you remember what you’re meant to do?” Archer asked as he checked all the straps on the saddle.
Nodding excitedly, Lottie reached down and scratched Night’s ears, getting a happy grunt for her efforts. She was lucky she could ride after our appointments with Parker yesterday. That asshole had almost ended up with his stethoscope up his ass.
Now, as someone who’d never had sex with a condom and who’d always gone for his physicals and passed, I didn’t expect him to pull out a swab and tell me he was going to stick it up my dick. I’d assumed it would be a run-of-the-mill blood test and then pee in a cup, but no. I wasn’t sure how other men coped, but if he’d given me an anesthetic, I might have come out of it in better shape. It was like he’d stuck a fork up there and scraped it around.
Obviously, Lottie hadn’t needed to get tested, but she’d been awesome when I’d come out limping. It was going to take a couple of days to get over it, and I had yet another reason to be relieved that I’d found Charlotte seeing as how I’d never have to go through it again.