My words trail off when I yank open my front door, and standing on my front porch under the glow of my porch light isn’t my mother with a pissed-off look on her face. Standing on my front porch, in a Dip and Twist T-shirt and a pair of my favorite jean shorts, with a nervous yet hopeful look in her eyes that are swimming with tears, and her phone clutched tightly in her hand, Wren looks up at me with those beautiful, watery blue eyes and cocks her head to the side while I try to remember how to breathe.
“If I promise not to call you a pussy, will you promise that everything you said in these messages are true?”
My hand is gripping so tightly to the edge of my open door I’m surprised I don’t splinter the wood. I was just cursing at myself for not saying everything in those messages to Wren’s face, and I should be repeating all of them right now to her without even hesitating. Everything I want to say is on the tip of my tongue, but she’s standing right here in front of me, and all I can think about is how I told her I’d never be able to be around her again without wanting to kiss the hell out of her. I never knew how true those words I typed to her would be until right this moment. My need for her is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before, shocking me to life and finally pulling my head out of my ass.
“Every fucking word” is all I can manage to growl before I’m stepping out onto my porch, grabbing her face in my hands, and swooping my head down, crashing my mouth against hers.CHAPTER 9Wren
“You better bring the heat.”I might not have a lot of experience with relationships or sex, but I’ve been kissed plenty. The one thing all those lackluster kisses that led up to this moment taught me is that they were all absolutely wrong. They were tentative and boring, slow and dull, and I realized they were a mistake before they were even finished.
When Shepherd’s mouth slams against mine, I swear I hear the thwack of a bat connecting with a fast ball, and everything is instantly right. We fit together like two missing pieces of a puzzle, and when his tongue pushes past my lips and tangles with my own, I feel like I’m that ball being catapulted into the sky, my feet leaving the ground, turning and tumbling as I sail through air. There’s nothing slow or dull about the way this man kisses me, and for the rest of my life, I will never, ever regret it. His tongue plunges into my mouth, swiping and swirling in a way that makes me feel it everywhere from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.
I understand it now when I’ve heard women say “His kisses drive me wild.” I feel like I’m going crazy, but in the best possible way. I want to scream, and I want to whisper, and I want to laugh, and I want to cry. He sucks on my tongue, and I immediately moan into his mouth, never in my life being turned on by a kiss until now. I’m so crazy turned on I’m fisting the front of Shepherd’s shirt to pull him closer, feel him everywhere, and deepen the kiss on my own this time as I push up on my toes.
I hear him growl into my mouth, and I feel it rumble from his chest pressed against mine, when I suddenly feel like I’m turning and tumbling through the air all over again, until I realize Shepherd has whirled me around on his front porch without breaking the kiss. My feet scramble backward to walk with him, clutching tighter to the front of his shirt while he kisses me with the same frantic urgency that’s coursing through my body. I brace for the feel of my back being slammed against the side of the house, but it never comes. We kiss, and we kiss, and we kiss as one of Shepherd’s hands drops from my face while we move, his arm quickly wrapping around me as we go. That firm, protective arm around my body is what slams into the side of the cottage instead of my back, and knowing he’s trying to protect me even while we’re both mindless from this kiss makes me realize just how much I’ve been missing all my life by kissing the wrong people. It makes the fire I’ve felt raging inside me since the first touch of his lips explode into an inferno that I never want to extinguish.
He holds me like an angel, soft and protective and full of care, one hand still gently cupping my cheek with his other arm wrapped firmly around me. But he kisses like the devil, hard and punishing and like he’s trying to claim me. His tongue sinks deeper, and I moan into Shepherd’s mouth again, one of my legs wrapping around the back of his, tugging him closer until his body flattens against mine, pushing me harder into the arm he holds around me against the side of the house. He sucks on my top lip in between deep, bruising kisses, and my body reacts like he just put his mouth between my legs and did the same thing.