“To fuck you?”
“Right.”
“Say it.”
There was that cocky smile again. That Crest gleam, with its dirty subtext.
“To fuck me.”
Lust fired up between her legs, just like that. Amazing, what those four little letters could do. She supposed she’d always known. Why else had she avoided swearing, once she’d given up on the whole notion of keeping her soul immaculate?
But she hadn’t understood that the power cut more than one way. It could be sexy to talk like this. Liberating.
“To fuck me,” she said again, and this time she watched that hard k light a fuse in his eyes. “I thought you planned to fuck me and then leave me a weeping mess.”
“That’s the plan.”
But his eyes were too kind, too warm. He wasn’t that sort of man. Not for her, anyway.
He reached for her waist, his hand a clamp, stronger than her own grip could ever hope to be.
He liked her. She thought maybe he liked her just as much as she liked him, and he didn’t know what to do about it. She didn’t know what to do about it, either, except to keep fumbling forward and see what happened.
Maybe it wasn’t the right thing.
They would find out together.
She stepped closer and placed her palm flat against his chest. It rose with his deep inhale.
His fingers tightened at the top of her thigh. When he spoke, the teasing tone was gone. “You sure you want this, Amber? With me? I don’t want to be the guy who finishes off the job of wrecking sex for you.”
“You won’t.” She smoothed her hands over his shoulders, running her thumbs up his neck. So tense. “Do you—do you still want to do this?”
His eyes dropped to the tuck in her towel. “If you’re sure.”
“You did say you would teach me how to misbehave.” She lifted his hand to the center of her chest. “So teach me.”
“I brought a condom up from the truck.”
“I have some in the bathroom.”
“All right, then.” He stroked his hand over her collarbone, then let it drop away. Rising, he grabbed a handful of shirt behind his head and pulled it off in one quick shucking motion.
Holy mackerel.
In a photograph, he’d be beefcake—bigger and more chiseled than any man she’d ever seen shirtless, bigger even than she might have thought she wanted, if she hadn’t already wanted him so much.
But the reality of him was so much better, so much more than the way he looked. The heat of his skin. The smell of his body, like rain and soap and sweat. The rise and fall of his chest.
He was beautiful and real. Not a body, flat in two dimensions, but a heart, a soul, a mind. All here because he wanted to be with her as much as she wanted to be with him.
Awe rose inside her, pushed tears into her eyes and made her breath catch.
Tony gripped her wrists and pulled her hands to the flat of his stomach, just above his belt buckle. “Touch me.”
She couldn’t quite believe she had permission, but she took it, gladly. She moved her hands off his belt onto his stomach, letting her knuckles drift lightly over all the shapes of him. The ridges of his abs, the swells of his pectoral muscles, his tight shoulders and the dip between bicep and elbow. Forearms and hands. He closed his eyes, and she shaped him, wanting a physical knowledge to match the pictures in her mind.
Not just a body. Tony’s body.