Aiden laughed softly. “You calling me old?”
I bit my lip to smother my grin. “No.”
He took the phone out of my hand and found a shot of his whole family, then let me study it. Just like my family, they held such a strong resemblance to each other but still managed to be a perfect balance of his parents.
“My parents were fifteen when they met,” he said. “Sixteen when my mom got pregnant with me.”
My eyes lifted in surprise. “Seriously?”
He nodded. “They got married before I turned two but knew they were still too young to add more kids into the mix.” Aiden pointed at the faces on the picture. “Beckham came when I was ten, then Clark, Deacon was next.” And when he gestured to a woman who looked younger than me, I found that I liked her broad smile and the way she looked like she was laughing. “And because she could be nothing other than the youngest and spoiled rotten, Eloise was the Hennessy family grand finale.”
“Wow,” I breathed. Before I could say anything else, a gentle tap on my shoulder pulled my attention from Aiden. It was the wedding coordinator.
“Sorry to interrupt, Isabel. We’re going to announce the wedding party, and then you can come back. Since Molly and Noah just have a table for the two of them, I only need to steal you away for a few minutes.”
Aiden smiled, joining me as I stood. The perfect gentleman on an unconventional first date.
And that continued, once I was able to join him at the table we were sharing with my sisters and their men. He kept a hand curled around my thigh under the table, engaging in pleasant conversation with everyone as we ate. Occasionally, he’d lean in and ask me something random, switching his hand from resting on my thigh, to stretching out behind my back along my chair.
“Favorite movie?”
I hummed. “I rarely watch them, so it’s hard to pick.”
“Really?” he said, clearly surprised.
“But,” I amended, “I love a good sports documentary.”
“Me too.” He leaned in for a sweet kiss.
It was so easy to forget other people were at the table when he looked at me that way. I didn’t really care if my sisters were watching with unabashed interest because Lord knows I’d had to watch my fair share of mooning over the last couple of years.
I slid my hand over his, relishing the easy affection. “The questions Anya asked me,” I started. He smiled sadly but didn’t interrupt. “What were those about?”
His chest expanded on a deep breath. Then he told me the story, and I didn’t even attempt to stop the tear that slid down my cheek. He brushed it away. “It was something she looked to for a long time as … truth, I guess. That if anyone would know, it would be Beth.”
“And you?” I asked carefully.
Aiden shook his head. “It was, I don’t know how to say it right. I wasn’t planning on using it as a checklist, if that’s what you’re asking, mainly because I had no intention of finding someone.” He curled his fingers around my thigh, smoothing it up and down. He gave me a wry smile. “But it probably didn’t help that you were the exact opposite of what she told Anya.”
I smiled. “Probably not.”
He studied me so intently.
“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
The thing I loved was that I could wait to ask him more because we had the time, not because I feared the reaction.
People shifted around us, moving to the dance floor as he and I talked.
He preferred winter over summer and broke his leg when he was twelve.
He didn’t drink often, and only one beer when he did.
When he went to college, his sister made him take a stuffed animal so he didn’t get lonely, and he kept it on his bed his entire freshman year, no matter how much his roommates teased him.
He asked me why I decided not to go to college and how it was being raised by my brother.
When the cake was cut and passed around, he took a piece of coconut, and I chose the strawberry, which we shared. When he held his fork out to me for a bite of his cake, I absently wondered if I’d ever get sick of talking to him. Of hearing what he had to say.
His eyes darkened when I licked at a speck of frosting at the edge of my lip.
When our plates were cleaned of cake, I sat back in my seat and surveyed him carefully. “Not a bad date, Hennessy.”
At the use of his last name, he quirked an eyebrow. “We’re back there.”
“Well,” I drawled, uncrossing my leg so that I could turn fully to face him, “I think you still owe me a little bit.”
“Do you?”
His dry tone had me smiling. “You didn’t have to buy me dinner,” I told him. “Or dessert.”
He hummed, caging me in by setting an arm on the table, the other stretched along the back of my chair. “How would you normally end a date like this?”
There was no way for me to answer that without giving myself away completely. I had no idea where the night would lead, but I knew where I wanted it to. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a date like this,” I told him with complete honesty.
Based on the look in his eyes, he saw the truth of my answer.
“Me neither.”
It knocked the breath from my lungs when he said it, and I didn’t realize how badly I craved some sort of sign that this intensity wasn’t one-sided, wasn’t confined just to my inexperience.
Because I couldn’t not, I leaned forward, cupping the side of his face in my hand, and I slid my lips over his in a soft kiss.
We left the kiss there, pulling back at the same time, content not to deepen it further.
Aiden turned, placing a kiss in the center of my palm. “Dance with me?” he asked.
Slowly, I nodded, and he stood, a firm hold on my hand as he led us to the dance floor crowded with people. We stood between a former defensive player of the year and his wife, and an executive from Molly’s job at Amazon, and not once did his attention waver.
It didn’t matter who surrounded us, I realized.
It didn’t matter what he may have experienced in his past, or what I had yet to experience in my future. This was about us. Aiden gathered our joined hands against his chest, over his steadily beating heart, and his other arm curled low around my waist as he pulled me into his body. My free hand slid around his back, and I laid my head on his chest as we swayed.
His fingers strayed slowly, first to the edge of my dress where it wrapped around my body, but he dipped beneath the fabric to strum featherlight touches along the curve of my hip. With a restless exhale, I shifted closer, and he tightened his hand around mine.
The beat of the song was slow and sweet, but in his arms, it became something else entirely. It was foreplay.
All of it had been.
For days and weeks.
My fingers on his back curled, nails digging slightly into the hard, shifting muscles on his back and I lost the ability to breathe properly when I closed my eyes and imagined how they’d feel when he moved over me. He’d be relentless. He’d be brutal if I begged it of him.
Aiden’s chest expanded on a deep inhale, his nose burying into my hair. When he made a restless shift of his own, I felt how much he wanted me. The noise that started in my throat was practically a purr. And he heard it.
“We either need to stop dancing or get the hell out of here,” he rasped in my ear.
Tilting my head up so I could lock gazes with him, I licked my lips before speaking. His nostrils flared when I did. “What will you do to me if I choose option two?”
Somehow, he managed to tighten his grip on me, bring me even closer to him so that he could rest his lips against the shell of my ear. “I am going to do everything,” he growled. “And trust me, my imagination has come up with a lot since you decided to climb into my bathtub without me.”
I was panting when I stepped back, my hands shaking. At first, his face smoothed like he thought I might deny him.
“You h
ave ten minutes to get a room,” I told him in a remarkably even voice. “I will meet you by the elevator.”
It took six minutes for me to hug and kiss Molly and Noah, who were swamped by people, and to inform the twins that I would be exiting the party early. No one argued with me, and Lia gave me an obnoxious high five.
I marched—shoes and clutch in hand—to the elevator, where I saw him waiting for me.
Calmly, he hit the button and slipped his hands into his pants pockets. I blew out a slow breath while the numbers descended.
In the quiet between us, I wondered a dozen things about how it would be between us, what waited when we opened the hotel room door to complete privacy.
But one thing I didn’t wonder was whether I’d been stupid to wait for someone who made me feel like this. There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation anywhere inside me. The doors opened, and we walked in side by side, silent as the grave.
Aiden pushed the button for the correct floor, and as soon as the doors closed, as soon as we were alone, he exploded into action.
Before I could breathe, I was against the wall, his mouth hard and demanding over mine, his hands ruthless as he strained the seams of my dress by pushing his grip underneath to fill his palms with my flesh.
His tongue was hot and slick, and I whimpered when it swept around mine in a tantalizing circle. My arms were around his neck so tightly that when he straightened, I could hardly find purchase on the floor. But I didn’t need it. He wrenched my hip up and rolled himself between my legs.
This kiss was a dark prelude that we’d danced around the entire time we knew each other.
It was dirty, and everything I wanted, everything I’d dreamed of from him. He devoured my mouth, tilting his head to deepen it further, and I stole the breath from his lungs because I’d not be the one to pull away.
I’d live there, in that kiss, if he let me.
His body shook from the force of everything he was pouring into our embrace. If we stayed on that elevator much longer, I swear, I would’ve given it up to him right there.
We arrived at our floor, an inconspicuous ding heralding the gentle stop of the car, and Aiden pulled back, breathing hard, lips red from our kiss.
“Fucking finally,” he said, tugging on my hand as I exhaled a laugh.
We rushed down the hall, and when he found the right door, he almost dropped the key in his haste to unlock the door.
Behind him, I couldn’t help myself. I pressed my front to his back and started unfastening his belt. A hand shot out, bracing against the doorframe, and he muttered another foul curse word when I got the buckle undone.
“I’m going to tell you something before we walk in that room,” I whispered against his heaving back. The muscles shifted against my forehead when he lifted his head. My nimble fingers pulled the leather belt from the metal buckle. “For reasons which we can discuss later, I need you to know that I’ve never done this before.” When his whole frame, big and broad, went still as a statue, I smiled. It should have made me feel at a disadvantage that I couldn’t see his face, but I’d never felt more powerful. Never felt so in control of what I wanted.
We were still in the hallway, and I tugged his shirt out of his loosened waistband and slid my hands over the ridges of his abdomen, which was all scalding skin and heavy muscle. When I tried to push my hand lower, Aiden growled my name. I stopped.
“You’re a …you’ve never—”
He couldn’t say it.
“Never,” I affirmed.
Aiden spun, gripping my face in his hands, eyes burning down at me. “Why?”
I gave him a coy smile, reaching behind his back to finish pushing the key card into the door. “I’ve never wanted anyone like I want you. No one’s hands or mouth,” I whispered, leaning up on my tiptoes to suck his bottom lip into my mouth, “and wasting time with someone who doesn’t know how to handle me has never been appealing.” I kissed down the strong column of his neck. “But I think you know exactly what to do.”
With a tortured groan, he slanted his mouth over mine, fisting his hand into my hair. Our tongues dueled, and I felt him grapple with the doorknob. I exhaled a laugh when he still couldn’t get it open.
Down the hall, we heard the ding of the elevator, and he tore his mouth from mine to face the entrance to the room again.
The door opened with a click, and he shoved it open so violently that it banged off the wall. Aiden turned, and the look in his eye had me breathless with anticipation, because I knew he was about to absolutely destroy whatever fantasy I’d had of him in the very best way. He reached forward, gathering a fistful of my dress, and tugged me forward as he walked backward into the room.
“You’ll pay for that,” he said, glancing down briefly at his opened belt.
“Promise?”
The door slammed shut behind me, and before he could move, I reached up behind my neck and unhooked the strap holding my dress up. Before it could fall, he stepped up to me, gripping the back of my neck.
“Nothing else comes off unless I do it,” he whispered against my lips.
My eyelids fluttered shut. I wanted to say something cheeky like, yes, boss, or maybe I’ll do it myself. But no words came. I’d lost the ability.
At my expression, he hissed in a breath through clenched teeth. “On the bed,” he commanded.
I walked into the room, heart thrashing and legs quaking as he locked the door.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Aiden
The click of the lock may as well have been a gunshot going off in the room. Red-hot tension coursed through my veins, angry at being pent-up for so long. Before I went to her, I pressed my forehead against the cool metal of the hotel door and attempted to steady my hands. They didn’t tremble because I was nervous, but I did feel a slight tremor of apprehension at my ability to keep myself in check.
Maybe it was the way I’d wanted her, or how long I’d resisted something that felt irresistible.
Maybe it was that I’d gone so long without this type of desire—wild and untamed. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt it, and I needed this moment of pause to ensure that I wouldn’t unleash a beast onto Isabel in my rib-crushing need to slake what she’d stirred in me.
Very little surprised me anymore.
The fact that she was a virgin almost made me fall to my knees in that sedately decorated hallway. Holding someone’s past against them was the sort of hypocrisy that I hated, but the fact that hers brought her to me untouched by any other man humbled me enough that I managed to calmly unbutton my shirt as I turned to where she waited for me. The other option was ripping it open in my haste to touch her, taste her, lose myself in her.
I’d still do all those things.
Isabel sat on the foot of the bed, hands braced behind her, long legs crossed demurely.
The way she held my eyes, the way hers burned as she watched me approach, it was like no image of any virgin I could’ve conjured.
Again, I was reminded of the black panther I’d seen at the zoo. I might’ve held a bit more experience than her, but she was looking at me like I was her next meal. And as soon as the thought crossed my mind, her eyes tracked down the front of my chest, and she licked her bottom lip.
Instead of prowling over her and pinning her hands over her head onto the soft mattress, I stripped off my shirt and let it fall in a heap on the floor.
She blew out a slow breath, and I held out my hand for her to stand. Not once did she blink shyly away, did her gaze waver, not a word spoken between us when she smoothed the flat of her hand up over my chest. My nostrils flared at her touch, the wildfire it set off in my blood. It had been so long, and I wanted her so viscerally.
It dawned on me as I drew my fingertips down the graceful line of her neck and carefully tugged her dress forward, that she and I were the same, and that was why I never expected her, never anticipated finding a well of feeling like this. Because I’d never, not in my entire life, met a woman who was my exact counterpoi
nt.
Some people found a soul mate in the one who filled in the gaps and closed in their pieces with one of their own. But she and I, we weren’t like that. Isabel and I were the same in the heat that ran through us, and instead of tempering the flames, we burned that much brighter together.
The crisscrossing straps of her dress fell with a whisper, and I sucked in a breath as she was bared to me. Isabel needed no guidance from me as she tugged down the small hidden zipper on the side of her dress, and it slid quietly off her hips until she stood before me in nothing but a tiny scrap of fabric.
I drew the tip of my finger down the front of her throat, whisper-light between her breasts until my hand spanned her waist. She was panting just from that single touch.
“So beautiful,” I murmured.
With the grace of a goddess, she sat back on the bed and quirked an eyebrow. “Your turn.”
I shucked my pants off, and she rolled her lips between her teeth. Her body laid out like that, it was no sacrifice to fall to my knees in front of her. I filled my hands with her flesh and tugged her hips against my stomach, Isabel clutched my head to her as I used my lips and tongue and teeth until she threw head back with a loud gasp. With a hand on her chest, I pushed gently until she laid back on the bed, and I crawled up and over her, licking a line over her hip bones, nibbling the curve of her ribs.
When I place a sucking kiss just underneath her belly button, her skin shook with anticipation.
“Oh, please,” she whispered.
“You’ve waited this long,” I murmured against the sleek muscle on her thigh. “You can be patient a little bit longer.”
Her head thrashed on the bed at the use of my fingers, back arching in a delicious curve. “I can’t.”
“Hands over your head,” I instructed. “If you can manage this without laying a hand on me, I’ll give you what you want.”
Instantly, she complied, and I felt the snarling beast inside me shake dangerously.
And then I used my mouth, her legs snapped tight over my shoulders, but she kept her hands fisted in the comforter. When she finally broke, a low moan wracked her frame. Fists planted on either side of her, I slid up the length of her body until I covered her completely. My hand curled over hers where it stayed on the bed as we kissed. As she worked through the aftershocks of what I’d done with fierce, deep kisses, angling her head to take more and more and more from me.
Forbidden: A Ward Sisters Sisters Novel Page 25