Down & Dirty (Lightning 1)

She’s gorgeous like this, so fucking gorgeous, and if I could I’d spend the night like this, making her come again and again and again. But even as I think it, my phone vibrates in my pocket and I know I’ve got to get home.

She comes down slowly, and I hold her

through it all. Stroking her back, pressing kisses to her damp, flushed skin. Trying to show her that she matters to me—that this thing we’re starting, whatever it is—matters to me, even though I’ve got to leave her.

“Well, that’s not quite how I was expecting this night to end,” she says when her breathing finally evens out.

“That’s a shame, cuz I think every evening I spend with you should end with you looking like this.”

“Sleepy?” she jokes.

“Relaxed,” I correct. “Sexy. Beautiful.”

“You are quite the charming one, aren’t you?”

“I try.”

“Oh, you do a lot more than try, I think.” She slides off my lap slowly, though I try to hold on for just a little longer. She feels good in my arms, better than anyone has in a really long time.

But when she reaches for my zipper, I pull her hand away and softly kiss the palm.

“What—”

“I’ve got to get going. There’s something at home I need to take care of.”

“You don’t want me to…”

“Oh, I want you to. Believe me. But it’ll wait.” I lean forward, press one, two, three kisses to her mouth. Then I climb out of the car and walk around to open her door for her.

“Which way is your apartment?” I ask as I help her out of the car.

“You don’t need to—”

“Which way?” I inject steel into my voice this time, watching as her eyes widen just a little in the dim light.

For a second it looks like she’s going to argue with me, but in the end she just sighs. “I’m two floors up,” she says, pointing to a rickety-looking staircase on our right.

I nod and clench my teeth to keep from saying something she’ll take the wrong way. I don’t like that she lives here but I’m smart enough to know that if I tell her that she’ll slap me back so fast my head will spin.

So I keep quiet as I close the car door and usher her toward the stairs, my hand on her lower back. When we get to her door—the first one next to the stairs, damn it—I say, “About tomorrow night. We don’t have to stay long if you don’t want. I just thought—”

“Thought what?” She looks up at me through her lashes, amusement dancing wickedly in her eyes.

And I suck it up, tell her exactly what I was thinking when I issued the invitation. “That I’d really like to dance with you.”

She stares at me for long seconds, looking for all the world like that was the last thing she expected me to say. Then she shakes her head and says, “What the fuck?”

Which is about the last thing I expected her to say. “Excuse me?”

She shakes her head. “I promised myself that I wasn’t going to swoon.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

She sighs. “It means, after you kissed me in your truck yesterday I told myself I wasn’t going to get all stupid and swoony.”

“I don’t think ‘swoony’ is a word.”

“The point is, I wasn’t going to fall for you.”