“You wouldn’t donate an organ for me?” I tease, lifting my wine glass to my own lips and taking a sip.
“I have a certain organ you can borrow tonight.”
Chapter Nineteen
Wine shoots up the back of my mouth and into my nose. The burning. Dear God, the burning.
“Did you—” snort “—seriously just use a frat boy line on me?” I tip my head back and feel white wine dribble down the back of my throat and cough. Hard. If I’m going to lose my voice after spending an evening with Andrew, this is not exactly how I want to lose it.
He dips his head down, biting his lips. “I guess I did.” He stands and finds a box of tissues on his fireplace mantel, walking across the room quickly to give them to me.
“Thanks, but what am I going to do with these? Shove them up my nose? I literally just inhaled your Domaine Leroy de whatever.”
“I’m out of practice. I haven’t done this in a while,” he confesses, hands on his hips in a gesture of mild cluelessness.
“Used frat boy lines on women you date?”
“Had a woman over to my apartment for dinner.”
“Oh.” As my nasal passages recover from being invaded by fermented fruit, I sniff. It hurts. I sniff again, over and over, until the pain in my sinuses and epiglottis dies down enough to swig a bunch of water.
“Are you okay now?”
“I think so. Remind me never to put wine in my Neti pot during allergy season.”
He looks relieved.
“When was the last time you had a woman over to your apartment for dinner?”
His arms drop slowly, his breathing controlled as he crosses the room. He’s turned the fireplace on, one of those glowing real-wood simulations that casts a gentle light behind his tall frame.
Andrew stops inches in front of me, his hands closing into soft fists.
“Is that important for you to know?”
“Yes.”
The kiss he plants on my lips is quick and simple, his mouth wet and warm.
“Never,” he says, fingers sliding up from my neck and sinking into my hair. His palms cup my jaw and I look up into eyes that ask me to follow him wherever he leads me.
“Never?”
“You’re the first.”
“You said you hadn’t done this ‘in a while’.”
“In a while is code for never.”
“You have your own language? I need to become fluent in Andrew.”
“It’s like speaking in tongues,” he murmurs against my neck, his mouth planting open kisses, tongue leaving wet gasps along the way.
“Like in church?” I ask, reaching down to cup parts of him that are speaking to me now. He hisses, the intake of breath the only response I need as I kiss him deeply.
“Oh, God,” he groans against my mouth.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
I am up in the air, his hands holding me by my ass, my legs temporarily stunned and bending up until my thighs are wrapped around his waist as if they had been programmed by a divine being to do so. My hands are against the hot skin at the back of his neck and I’m blinded by the sheer force of the kiss and our movement. His mouth is a playground, and I’m on the swings. The merry-go-round. The see-saw.
And the slide, down, down, down...
My back hits a smooth, cool softness as I realize he’s brought me into his bedroom and set me on his bed. His body folds across mine, covering me with a marbled, muscled fullness that is so exquisite I arch up, seeking more. His hands are everywhere, buried in my hair, cupping each breast, that glorious mouth tonguing and tasting and no longer teasing.
No questions any more. We both know exactly where this is going.
Thank god.
“I have wanted you so much and for so long,” he murmurs, rolling off me just enough to prop his jaw in one hand and look at me.
My mind skips. Just...skips. It’s like there’s a short circuit in the universe and everything halted for two seconds, but resumes.
“You have? Because I’ve been right here. All along.” My words are soft and yielding, just like my body. My skirt is up around my hips and his caress is complete in its savoring of me. The intensity flows through his fingers like a current, a constant flow of emotion and need that surges through him to me.
Being felt like this—not just touched or stroked or catalogued—takes a level of steadiness in me that I’m surprised to find I possess. Maybe I only have it when I’m with him. I don’t know. Instead of turning toward him or rolling to hide, I let him use his hands to study my body with a visceral connection that is wholly unknown to me.
His eyes go contemplative, his breath unhurried as I, in turn, touch him. We don’t kiss. Not yet. Not now.
“I know you have.” His voice crawls along the contours of my skin, as if it’s traveling by blood through my veins, seeking to send its message of desire to every pore, each cell. “And thank you.”
“Thank you? Thank you for what?” My own hands itch to touch all of him, eagerness more powerful than patience. His waist is tight as I tunnel my fingers between the waistband of his trousers and his shirt and pull the fabric out, seeking the warm expanse of his toned back.
“For—” he says, his voice halting. “For waiting.”
“I haven’t been waiting,” I explain. “I gave up.” Being this honest would crush any other interaction with any other man, but not this time. Not this moment.
Not this man.
As I take in the lines of his shoulders, memorizing the angle of his shoulder blades, using my fingertips to chart the curl of muscle against bone, I appreciate the broad stretch of skin that houses the essence of him.