Keep This Promise

by Willow Winters

  There is nothing wrong with my body, I reminded myself.

  It was just my desire wired inextricably to my heart.

  Even with him standing there pissed about something, I wanted him.

  “Jamie?”

  He dragged his gaze down my body, lingering on my cleavage, before traveling south, leisurely. Almost insultingly.

  I stiffened. “What is it?”

  Those ocean eyes came back to mine.

  Was it Wex?

  My breath caught at the thought. No. It couldn’t be.

  “Jamie?”

  “So, you put on a sexy dress and suddenly my teammates are fair game?”

  I noticed his fists were clenched at his sides.

  Anger flushed through me, and I knew I was blushing with it. “I didn’t think you’d notice or care, what with the champagne blond and the three girls before her.”

  Jamie’s head jerked back like I’d hit him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Lorna filled me in on the girls, and I saw the blond for myself.”

  “What girls?”

  “The three girls you made out with before the party even got started.”

  He scowled and closed the distance between us, his chest against mine, forcing me against the sink. I leaned away, curling my fingers around the edge of the porcelain. I couldn’t breathe properly with him this close.

  “Lorna is talking shit as usual. There were no girls. As for the blond”—he bent his head toward me, eyes hot with anger—“she cornered me. I didn’t initiate that.”

  I ignored the fact that Lorna lied about the girls. “Yeah, you looked like you were not enjoying that at all.”

  His eyes narrowed at my sarcasm. “Why do you care who kisses me?”

  “Why do you care who kisses me?” I countered.

  Jamie leaned his hands on the sink, caging me in. “My teammates are off-limits to you.” His breath whispered against my lips as he pressed his whole body against mine.

  He was hard.

  I gasped and his eyes flashed.

  “Everyone but me is off-limits to you, Jane. You got that?”

  “I don’t belong to you,” I whispered. It sounded weak. I hated that it sounded weak. Why did he do this to me? How could one person affect me so much?

  “Yes, you do.” His voice was hoarse. “And I belong to you.” He swallowed hard. “I was going to wait. I’m supposed to wait.”

  “For what?”

  “For you to turn eighteen.”

  I knew that I should feel euphoric that Jamie wanted me, but his words hurt. He could wait? And what would he be doing while he waited? I mean, according to him, all other men were off-limits to me, but a player like Jamie didn’t give up sex for nine months.

  He must have seen the fury in my eyes because he tensed. I pushed against his chest, but he wouldn’t budge. “Move.”

  “What just happened?” He pressed even deeper against me. “What is going on in that busy head of yours?”

  “You were going to wait nine months? And I’m to believe you weren’t going to have sex with other girls in that time?”

  That telltale muscle in his jaw ticked. “I’ll never lie to you, Jane.”

  Bastard!

  I pushed against him harder, but he wouldn’t be moved. “Move out of my way.”

  “You never yell,” he suddenly whispered, dropping his head to the crook of my neck. I felt his lips on my skin and shivered, despite myself.

  God, I hated him in that moment.

  He pressed a soft, sweet kiss to my neck and then lifted his head to whisper in my ear, “I’ve tried to fuck other girls. To fuck you out of my head.” He pulled back to stare into my eyes. The intensity of his searing emotion caused a ripple of need low and deep inside me. “I can’t,” he confessed. “I try to be with them and it’s like a thirst that’s never sated. I can’t go through with it— with being with them.”

  “Why?” My voice sounded hoarse.

  “Because they’re not you. I don’t want to be with anyone but you.”

  “You don’t mean that.” I shook my head, afraid to believe him.

  He cupped my face in his hands and brought our lips to almost touching. “I will never lie to you,” he promised. Then he crushed his mouth over mine and I was lost.

  It wasn’t a sweet kiss.

  It was deep and searching, tongue licking against tongue, lips pushing against lips, and hands pulling at each other. I tugged at his T-shirt, trying to haul him closer, while he couldn’t seem to decide which part of me he wanted to touch the most. My hips, my waist, my breasts. When he squeezed my breasts in his palms, his thumbs catching over my nipples, I throbbed with desperate need between my legs. I moaned into his mouth.

  “Fuck.” Jamie broke the kiss, panting. His eyes were bright with desire, desire I could feel pulsing against my stomach through his jeans. “I have to touch you.”

  I smiled shakily. The moment felt so surreal. Years of longing finally realized. “I thought you were.”

  He gave me a quick shake of his head as he gathered the hem of my dress in his hands. “Let me touch you.”

  Understanding what he meant, I blushed and felt that throb intensify. My body swayed with need, and I grabbed hold of the sink for balance. Unable to speak, I nodded.

  All those nights of fantasizing about this, and it was going to happen.

  Jamie leaned his forehead against mine, his breath quickening even more as he pushed the dress up to my waist. “I’ve imagined this,” he whispered, his voice thick with lust. “More times than I count. Lying in bed, in the shower, hand around my dick. You in my head.”

  I shook with increasing need.

  “Have you fantasized about me?”

  I nodded, blushing harder.

  “Say it.” He lifted his forehead from mine, his expression as demanding as his tone. “Tell me you’ve thought about me like I’ve thought about you.”

  I think I surprised myself more than I surprised Jamie when I whispered, “I lie in bed and I touch myself only ever thinking about you.”

  Jamie kissed me again, ferocious, consuming, until I clung to his shoulders to hold myself up. I shivered against him as his fingers tickled my stomach, and then I tensed as he slipped his hand down my belly and pushed beneath my underwear.

  “You okay?” he broke the kiss to ask, his fingers stilling.

  As strange as it was to have someone touch me where only I ever had, this wasn’t just “someone.” This was Jamie. My instinct was to push against his touch. “Please.”

  He didn’t kiss me again.

  Instead, Jamie held my gaze, his jaw clenched with tension, as he pressed his thumb over my clit and pushed two longer fingers inside me. I cried out against the unexpected pressure, my fingers biting into his shoulders.

  “Fuck, Jane,” he panted.

  My eyes fluttered closed with sensation as he circled my clit. “Jamie,” I breathed out his name on a pleasured sigh.

  “Open your eyes.”

  They flew open.

  “Good.” He grunted. “Eyes on me.”

  It was so much more intimate like that, holding his gaze as he slid his fingers in and out.

  “So tight.” He bared his teeth at me. “So fucking tight, Doe.”

  I smiled on a gasp at the return of his Boston accent. “Jamie.” I dug my fingers in deeper as I pushed against his touch, riding his fingers.

  “That’s it, fuck me, Jane, fuck me,” he murmured hoarsely against my lips. He groaned as I physically responded to his dirty talk. “So full of surprises. You’re perfect. Made for me.”

  As the tension built, little cries choked in my throat as Jamie pushed me toward climax.

  “Don’t stifle it,” Jamie demanded. “No one can hear you back here but me. And I want to hear how much you want this.”

  “Jamie.” I pushed under his T-shirt, wanting to feel him, caressing the ridges of his abs with one hand, as I held onto his waist with the othe
r. Instinct made me raise my leg against his hip, opening myself further to him. The thrust of his fingers sped up. “Oh God,” I panted, eyes still locked on his. “Jamie.”

  “One day I’ll be inside you completely,” he promised. “I’m going to be your first and your only, Jane.”

  That made me even hotter than the dirty talk. My cries grew louder, and Jamie brushed my lips with his. “More.”

  “Oh my God.” I let go, riding his fingers with desperation, clawing at his abs with my nails.

  One last rub on my clit.

  “Jamie!” I cried out, shuddering and jerking against his hand, throbbing and contracting around his fingers.

  All the strength went out of my body. I melted into him. Nothing but a satisfied heap of hot-skinned Jane.

  He slipped his fingers out of me and gently tugged down the hem of the dress. Lips on mine, his erection digging into my stomach, he whispered, “Why? Why is making you come the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen and heard in my life?”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head, unable to do much of anything at that moment.

  “I do.” He took my chin beneath his fingers with one hand, forcing my head up, my eyes to his. The look in them made me want to melt all over again. “It’s because it’s you. No one does it for me like you do. You have no idea.”

  I laughed, because I absolutely did. And it was amazing to me that Jamie felt the same. “I do. I understand completely.”

  “Yeah?” He kissed my lips, soft, sweet, just a caress. Then he pulled back, his expression stern. “Then you’ll know it’s no laughing matter. You should be worried, Doe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I feel like I’m coming out of my skin. You’re all I think about. You’re all I want. When I want someone’s opinion on something, you’re the first person I think of. I don’t want to be in class because it means I’m not hanging out with you, talking about important shit and not-so-important shit … I want to be buried deep inside you.”

  He nodded, swallowing hard. “Not just …” He slid his free hand under my dress and cupped me in a possessive gesture. “Not just buried in here.” He lifted his hand from my chin and tapped my temple. “But in here.” Then he moved it to cover my breast where my heart pounded beneath it. “And I want to be so deep in here, you’ll never get me out. Because you’re buried in me.”

  Joy suffused me in such a wave of bliss and relief, tears blurred my vision. “You’re already there, Jamie. You have been for a long time.”

  A tear spilled over and Jamie cursed under his breath, catching it on his thumb as he clasped my face in his big hands. “I’m such a moron.” His voice was harsh. Then he kissed me. He kissed me like I was oxygen. “Forgive me,” he begged between kisses. “Forgive me for being so slow on the uptake.”

  I laughed against his mouth. “You got there in the end. That’s all that matters.”

  We kissed until my lips felt sensitive and swollen, until Jamie was clutching at my thigh and grinding his erection into my stomach.

  “We need to stop.” He pulled back, panting. “Before we go too far.”

  “Maybe I want to go too far.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Not until you’re eighteen.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “I don’t want to rush you. I want this to be right.”

  His jaw set stubbornly. With a groan of frustration, he released me and stepped back toward the door. “You should go out first.” He gestured to his erection tenting his jeans. “I need a minute.”

  Although nervousness filled me, I didn’t want to leave him just yet.

  “I have your gift here.” I held it out to him. “Maybe that’ll give you a chance to … cool off.”

  He flashed me a smile and took the gift in hand. “This was on the pile downstairs. I know, because I’ve been eyeballing it since Lorna took it from you.”

  That thrilled me and made me even more nervous about his reaction.

  “Why is it up here now?”

  “I, uh, when I saw you kissing the blond, I suddenly realized that if you opened this, you’d probably guess what you mean to me and then you’d feel sorry for me.”

  “One, she kissed me, and if you’d stuck around long enough, you would’ve seen me push her off and search the room frantically to see if you’d caught her doing it.”

  I laughed at his teasing, my worries eased. “Okay.”

  “And two”—he stepped into my personal space, eyes hooked on mine—“I would never be sorry or feel sorry about you having feelings for me. The opposite, in fact.”

  “I get that now,” I teased right back.

  With a nod, Jamie’s eyes dropped to the gift. Then, with an exasperating slowness, he opened it. When he pulled out the somewhat tattered copy of I Am Legend, he raised an eyebrow.

  “Open it.”

  When he did, he tensed at the sight of the author’s signature. “Is this a signed first edition?”

  “Yeah.”

  His eyes flew to mine and my breath hitched at the hunger I saw on his face.

  “You like it?” I whispered.

  “It’s the best gift I’ve ever gotten.” He placed the book carefully down on the sink and then shot me a wry look. “And now I’m hard again.”

  My laughter cut off when he suddenly lowered to his knees. “What are you doing?”

  “I want to say thank you.”

  I gasped as he pushed my dress back up to my waist and then curled his fingers around my underwear. “Shouldn’t we get back to the party? People will notice.”

  “Fuck ’em.” He pulled down my underwear, and I stepped out of them. Eyes on mine, he watched as I shivered at the feel of his hands caressing my inner thighs before pushing them apart. I widened my stance, dragging in shallow breaths.

  Jamie’s eyes dipped to the shadow between my thighs. He groaned, and then his mouth was on me, and I forgot about anything else but him.

  There was a moment as I rode his mouth, abandoned myself to pleasure, that I wondered if this was the beginning of something we couldn’t control.

  And should it scare me?

  Probably.

  But Jamie McKenna just felt too damn good, and too damn right, for me to care about anything else.

  Chapter 6

  JAMIE

  Nineteen years old

  * * *

  The swipe of Jane’s pencil against the sketch paper was driving me nuts. Who knew posing for a drawing would be so sexy?

  Jane sat on my desk chair, her eyes moving over my body and flicking down to the pad in her hand as she followed the lines of my body with her pencil. There was a smoky heat in her gaze that made me hot all over.

  “Isn’t this objectification?” I teased.

  “It’s art,” she replied, her lips twitching with amusement.

  “I’m not sure I need to be wearing only boxers for you to sketch me.”

  Our eyes met, and the blood that was making my heart pound quickly made its way south. I wanted to tell her to get over on the bed, but we’d only been seeing each other for six weeks, and the no-sex thing was already testing my limits.

  “You’re beautiful,” she whispered, and I could tell she meant it. “The lines of your body are beautiful. I want to see them.”

  She wanted to see all of them.

  It was me who insisted I keep my boxers on. We needed some boundaries; otherwise I’d lose myself in her. Which was exactly what my shy, not-so-shy-with-me, sexy girl wanted.

  “It would be better if you lost the boxers,” Jane said.

  See?

  I grinned at her and shook my head. “What if Lorna came home? It would be pretty hard to explain why I’m letting you draw me naked.”

  “It’ll be pretty hard to explain why you’re letting me draw you half-naked,” she argued.

  For the sake of peace, and so we got to know each other as boyfriend and girlfriend before World War III broke out, we’d kept our relationship a secret from
everyone. The truth was, we didn’t want to have to deal with Lorna just yet. However, I didn’t know how much longer I could handle the secret. It had only been a month, and the small moments of time we stole when I didn’t have practice and Lorna had practice after school was quickly becoming not enough.

  “Hmm.” Jane bit on the end of her pencil, her eyes moving between me and the sketch.

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t get your left nipple right.”

  I chuckled. “Nipple problems, huh?”

  She sent me a smile that caused a flutter in my stomach. A fucking flutter. These past few weeks, I’d discovered a new side to Jane. She was quiet, reserved, kind of shy, yes … but not with sex. She was uninhibited with me. Jane just had to look at me, how she looked at me right then, and my dick got hard.

  Not that we’d had sex. I was determined not to until she was eighteen. But we were doing other shit, and Jane was so beyond passionate and exciting, I was losing my mind.

  Holding out for another eight months … well, it might as well have been ten years.

  I watched as she put the sketch pad on my desk and then got up to cross the room to me. My eyes dipped down her body and back up. She was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt, and it made me as hot as sexy lingerie on her would have.

  “Jane …” Her name came out hoarse. “What are you doing?”

  “I need a closer look.” She placed a knee on the bed and crawled toward me on all fours.

  Fuck.

  Her citrusy scent tickled me as she pressed a hand to my chest and gave it a little push.

  I obliged by rolling onto my back, already hard.

  Then she straddled me, resting her ass right on my erection.

  I hissed in a breath as her eyelids lowered and she gave a little moan.

  “Jane.” I gripped her hips, half wanting to push her off and half needing to grind her on me.

  “Let’s have a look,” she murmured, bending her head toward my nipple. Her thumb rotated over it and I shifted beneath her, my skin flushing. Then she kissed it, tongue flicking against the nub.

  “Fuck.” My fingers bit into her hips and I pushed her down over me.