by Nicole Helm
Oh, that’s not all your mouth wants to do where she’s concerned. He turned to the pantry, as much to keep his mind off his dick as to get the bag of marshmallows he hoped he had somewhere.
He rummaged around until he found a half-eaten bag in the back. He gave them a test squeeze, happy to find them not stale, then turned back to her.
He was never quite ready for that punch, no matter how many times in the past few days he’d turned to find her in his house, in his space. It was a jolt every time. A little zap of electric current, like touching an exposed wire.
“Marshmallows,” he managed, lamely holding out the bag.
She pulled her bottom lip through her teeth, slowly and very, very distractingly, and then on a deep breath she moved toward him.
She took the bag and then set it down on the counter. She took a deep breath, odd and out of place, as though she had to build up the courage to drink some hot chocolate, which didn’t make any sense—
Then she stepped closer. Close enough that their toes were practically touching, close enough that she had to tilt back her head to meet his gaze. Close enough that if he didn’t meet her gaze he could see the faint points of her nipples through the thin fabric of his T-shirt that she wore.
She stood there, close, her breathing a little shallow and her hands moving out as though to touch him, then falling abruptly to her sides, then inching closer again.
He was rendered speechless and possibly motionless for a few seconds. She was standing practically pressed against him, apparently nervous and uncertain and what else could she be possibly thinking but . . .
It baffled him that she’d have any reason to be nervous about making a move on him. Didn’t she know he’d fall at her feet a million times over?
If she didn’t, then he supposed it was his job to assure her of it. He was a fixer after all.
He cupped her cheek, letting his fingertips explore the cool, soft texture of her skin. He stepped closer, widening his stance so that she fit against him, her legs between his, her chest against his.
His body thrummed with that current, that zip of life and power and spark. He lowered his mouth, slowly, giving her all the chances in the world to—not retreat exactly. His hold on her face wasn’t going anywhere, but she had the chance to say something, to ward him off.
She didn’t use that chance. His mouth touched hers, something unknown shuddering through him. Something unfamiliar flickering into life. A warmth, a centering as though he’d been waiting for just this. Always.
Which didn’t make any sense, but what did make sense was the way her body fit against his, the way her arms tentatively and then tightly wound around his neck. The way her mouth opened under his, a wet hot invitation to invade.
Which was not an invitation he’d decline in any universe. He swept his tongue over her lips and into her mouth, drowning in a flavor he’d never even let himself guess at.
Kayla Gallagher tasted like summer-sun-soaked berries. Sweet and warm and a bright, a delectable contrast to every damn dreary thing in his life.
She made some sound, a moan or sigh, and it made the hand on her cheek not nearly enough. He stroked one palm down the soft, elegant curve of her neck, let his other hand tangle in the wet red waves of hair—a shining beacon on a woman who’d always seemed so bent on hiding.
Until recently, anyway. She’d been the one to invite herself here, to step forward, and he may have been the one to kiss her, but it never would have happened if not for her first move.
It should feel dreamlike, but instead her body was a warm, delicious reality against him. He smoothed his palm down her spine and she arched into him, and there was no way she could miss the hard ridge of his erection against her midsection.
Would he feel the same response from her? If he tugged off his own sweatpants from her body and slid his hands between her legs, would she be as wet for him as he was hard for her from just a kiss?
His hands itched to do just that, to slide over her ass to the front of her pants and undo the flimsy knot that kept him from knowing.
She licked into his mouth, pressing more firmly against him, her fingers rifling through his hair, and it took every ounce of reason and restraint to keep his hands above her clothes.
Not everyone leaped ahead like he did. He’d been made aware of that a few more times than he cared to remember. Women always seemed to find him a little too something—his high school girlfriend had found the fact he had hair on his chest “problematic.” His last girlfriend had decided after a few months that he was just too “traditionally masculine.”
And everything he wanted to do with Kayla was very, very traditionally masculine. He wanted his cock inside of her and his mouth all over her skin. He wanted to know what every inch of her tasted like, and he wanted to hear her scream his name.
“Liam.” It was a whisper, but it was damn good enough.
Her head had fallen back and her eyes fluttered open, that dark blue meeting his gaze with a dazed kind of satisfaction, but it was the way her mouth curved into something very close to a self-satisfied smirk that just about did him in.
He splayed his hands on her lower back, sliding them over the curve of her ass, pulling her closer, settling the length of his erection between her legs and giving a little thrust.
Her head fell back even farther and she sighed, fingers digging into the back of his neck. She was stunning, the length of her pale neck exposed and glowing in the light of the candles and the camping lantern, her hair waving out of the braid she’d haphazardly put it in as it dried from the rain. Her eyes were half closed, though she watched him carefully.
He wanted to scrape his teeth across her neck. He wanted to grip his hands into her red shimmering hair. He wanted to do a million things that would probably be deemed too much.
So he settled himself on the least too much course of action he could think of. He held her gaze as he moved his hands to the front of her pants and found the tie. He tugged the string loose. She didn’t move, didn’t break eye contact, just looked at him, her arms still around his neck as the fabric fell to the ground.
She made another one of those noises, something that almost reminded him of a cat purring, as she trailed her fingertips down his chest and abdomen. She tugged at the hem of his shirt, lifting it as far as she could manage before he had to help her get it over his head.
It fell to the floor with her sweatpants. She inhaled sharply and for a second of intense disappointment, he was certain this was the moment where she decided it—he—was that little bit too much.
Instead, she reached out and put a palm to his chest, her fingers splaying across the hair there, then following the trail down to the waistband of his shorts. She paused, her eyebrows knitting together as if contemplating something of grave importance.
He wanted to touch her, feel the rough of his hands against the soft, creamy skin of her thighs, the hot wet center of her, but he willed himself to give her a second to figure out whatever problem she was trying to solve.
On another one of those courage-rallying deep breaths, she leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the center of his chest, and then higher, then where his beard met neck, and then his mouth, just a gentle brush of her berry-flavored lips, even as her fingertips moved softly across where his shorts hung on his hips.
She looked up at him through thick, burnished-gold lashes. “I don’t suppose you have any condoms?” she asked, her fingers dipping under the waistband of his shorts, teasingly far away from where he wanted them.
“Um, no.” Though he’d run out and get some first thing in the morning without hesitation. “But we do have hands and mouths,” he offered, a little too drunk on her proximity, on her taste, on how fucking gorgeous she was to care about anything being too much.
Her entire hand slid under his shorts and boxers, her cool, slim fingers wrapping around his throbbing cock. “I suppose that’ll do,” she returned with mock seriousness, before flashing him a grin.
Chapter Eight
Kayla had a man’s penis in her hand. Not just any man’s penis, Liam Patrick’s penis. And not because they’d been going out for a certain amount of dates or months. Just because she’d wanted to.
He was hot and hard in her palm and when she stroked, that electric blue of his eyes never once wavered from hers. The intensity there, the heat, made her breath back up in her lungs, but it didn’t make her stop.
Because she had been changed over the course of her too-long break from Gallagher’s and that old Kayla she didn’t want to recognize was gone. She had been changed in Liam’s workshop, altered in the rain.
She was blooming, and being brave, and taking something she wanted. She was throwing herself into the fire of confusion and emotion and something complicated instead of running away from all those things.
She stroked him again, watching the way his eyes seemed to turn into blue crystal, prisms of light, and she wanted that grim certainty he had lurking there, as though he knew everything about his place in the world.
But more, so much more, she wanted him. That kiss. His touch. Her body already yearned for something she’d only just experienced, and damned if she’d be too afraid to get it.
“Touch me,” she forced herself to say, and no matter that her words were a shaky, nervy whisper, or that her whole body recoiled at the thought of embarrassing herself, she’d said it.
And he did.
His mouth crushed to hers, hot and demanding, his arms around her in a tight band, trapping her arm exactly where it was—between them, fingers curled around his erection incapable of moving to stroke, but she forgot all about that as he kissed her. A kiss made of lips and tongue and teeth, a wildness she’d never experienced in herself, in someone else. There was no timidity, no question, and most of all no attempt to maneuver things any which way.
He was simply kissing her as if she was the air he needed to breathe, and she held on to him like floating debris in a stormy ocean. She felt unmoored and free, full of electricity and something . . . unnameable.
Usually no matter how long she’d been with someone, physical intimacy was nerve-wracking. She never knew quite what a guy expected of her, what he might want from her, it always felt as if there was some special secret she’d never been privy to, and she’d definitely never known how to ask for the answers.
But with Liam she didn’t feel nerves or questions. Not in this moment with his mouth desperate on hers and his arms banded around her.
His tight grip loosened, his hands sliding down her back and then she felt her shirt lifting. Since her underwear and bra had been soaked through, she’d discarded them with her other clothes. Which meant with the sweatpants gone and the shirt being lifted off her head, she was completely naked. In Liam’s kitchen. Just naked.
In some dim part of her brain she thought she should feel silly or embarrassed maybe, but he looked at her as no man had ever looked at her. As though she were some work of art, some goddess worthy of worship.
He muttered a curse, but his hands were immeasurably gentle as he cupped her face and then slid down her neck. Big and warm, that and the cool of the room causing her skin to goose bump, her nipples to pull into tight points.
But Liam kept touching her, and it warmed away any chill in the room. His rough hands molded over her body like he was a sculptor forming her into something else entirely, or she was sculpting herself, or this moment was, because she didn’t feel like herself. She felt better than she ever had.
His hands palmed her breasts and his mouth found her neck, an openmouthed kiss before his teeth scraped gently down the slope to her shoulder.
She moaned and it sounded overloud to her ears, but she hardly cared as his thumbs brushed her nipples, as he pulled her body to his and she could feel the hard length of his cock through his shorts pressing against her.
It really was a shame they didn’t have condoms. She wanted to know what it would be like to be filled and stretched by him. Would it have the same magic this moment seemed to have, or would it be the same as every other mildly entertaining sexual encounter she’d experienced?
Liam’s hands smoothed down her sides and to her hips, holding her there as he pressed himself against her, his mouth moving from her neck to the top of her breasts.
She felt like she was shuddering apart, and it was getting harder to breathe evenly. Her heart beat hard, as if she’d run a race, and then his tongue touched her nipple. She swallowed to keep from squeaking, blinking down at his dark head over her chest. She seemed to pulse in time with the flicks of his tongue.
But when he sucked her nipple deep into his mouth, the pulse was a sharp, needy pang that made her knees buckle.
He laughed against her breast—actually laughed—and she wanted to laugh too. Instead, she held on to his shoulders and righted herself, but he didn’t continue. Instead, he straightened, but as he did he linked his hands under her ass and lifted. She let out a half gasp, half laugh and looked down to see his eyes sparkling with what was sure to prove to be a very dirty mischief.
“Grab the lantern,” he ordered.
She leaned forward to grab the handle of the lantern that was on the counter behind him, one hand still clutched on his shoulder. Not that he seemed to have any problem carrying her.
His lips brushed against her collarbone as he walked, as though she weighed next to nothing, out of the kitchen and down the hall. His bristled cheek brushed against her dampened, needy nipple—whether out of accident or design—and she jolted at the amazing pop of pleasure.
“Steady,” he murmured, nudging the door to his bedroom open with his elbow.
Steady? She was vibrating with a million things, and most of them were good things. But she couldn’t manage steady or easy or even breathing that wasn’t heavy.
Liam lowered her onto the bed, taking the lantern from her grasp and placing it on to a nightstand next to the bed. Then he was over her, so tall and broad and . . .
She sighed dreamily. She loved that she could tell just from looking at the curve of his arms as he held himself above her that he was strong enough to carry her around. She already loved the way the whiskers of his beard scratched against her skin. And she loved that he could smile and look at her like he wanted to devour her at the same time.
“If you don’t like anything, tell me to stop,” he said, his eyes diamond blue on hers, his voice threaded with graveled seriousness.
She blinked at him and she supposed for some people that would be obvious, but to her it was like a revelation. She could and should speak up when she didn’t like something, when she wanted something else.
That had never truly occurred to her before, not in that serious, straightforward way. She’d always figured with sex or anything leading up to sex you were supposed to say what the other person wanted to hear, do what the other person expected of you.
He watched her expectantly, waiting for her response. Was there a response to that that wasn’t an enthusiastic, Yes, sir. “O-okay,” she managed to say
This was all astonishing. Liam Patrick’s mouth had been on her breasts. He’d touched her everywhere except where she pulsed, needy and desperate for him. Liam Patrick.
He wasn’t that gruff, disapproving figure she’d made up in her mind. Liam was none of the things she’d assumed of him or attributed to him. He was warm and he was kind. He called himself a fixer, but what he really did was help people.
Because he could, and because he felt like he should.
He carved lovespoons and read up on symbols. He went to mass because his grandmother wanted him to. And he’d kissed her like she wasn’t some timid, fragile thing.
She rubbed her fingertips over his bearded jaw, in awe of so many things about Liam.
“What do you want, Kayla?” he murmured, brushing a kiss against her mouth, and then her shoulder. He kept one hand pressed to the mattress by her waist, keeping his weight off of her, but his other hand drew patterns down her arm, across her
stomach.
Still, agonizingly still, he hadn’t touched her where she most wanted him. What did she want? She took a deep breath, steeling herself to ask for something. She’d learned to refuse things she didn’t want, and that had been hard once, but asking for what she did was untested. New.
Fucking terrifying.
Be brave. Be brave.
“Touch my . . .” She couldn’t quite make her mouth form the word. Surely he knew what she was getting at. That was close enough, right?
But he raised an eyebrow, as if daring her, and damn it, she was brave. She could say dirty words. She could demand things she wanted. “Touch my pussy, Liam.”
His mouth curved into a grin she’d never seen on him. Nearly wolfish and self-satisfied. Unbearably handsome. “Have you never said that word before?”
She laughed nervously. “Uh, no. At least not during sex, or almost sex, or yes, probably ever.”
“My daring Kayla,” he murmured, dropping his mouth to hers, even as his hand slid down her abdomen, and then her thigh, pushing her legs open.
Daring. His. She liked the idea of both of those.
And then he stroked, one long, blunt finger tracing her. She made a strangled sound, fidgeting restlessly underneath him. Each stroke was slow, delicious torture. Too light, too easy. She needed more, so much more.
“Liam.”
“Hmm?”
She huffed out an irritated breath. Usually these things went fairly quickly and she didn’t have to do any talking, but usually they didn’t feel like this. Like she was nothing but fissuring light, pleasure and desperation, and a sharp clawing feeling in her chest that things would not be okay until Liam was on top of her, inside of her.
“More,” she said, and her voice wasn’t the least bit stuttering or whispered this time. She demanded it, loud and sure. “More, please.”
And though she’d told him, he was still far too slow about it. His finger sliding only incrementally deeper with each stroke, but it was like drowning in ecstasy, a wonderful pleasure, a wonderful need, but she needed more of it. She needed so much more of it.