Why am I awake?
It’s late. I can just feel that dawn is still hours away. Why am I awake?
Creak-creak-creak-creak.
Someone’s on the stairs.
Tyler? The footsteps sound heavy.
Can he make it down the stairs that fast? Would Lark descend that slowly?
What if it’s neither of them?
I sit up, heart pounding.
Relax, Stella. If Kaleb Doucet found us, how would he even get in?
I frown into the darkness.
I know I locked the front door.
The footsteps land on the entryway floor and stop.
I mentally circumvent the house. Three porches. The big front porch. The one off my room. And the smaller one off the living room. We never use that door, so it’s always locked.
Except Maisy caught a ladybug in the living room yesterday morning and rehomed it outside.
Shit. Did I lock the door after she came back in?
Footsteps creak in the entryway. If it’s Tyler, he’ll come through the dining room. Then the kitchen. It’s the shortest way to his bedroom.
No need to follow the entryway to the back. Where a right turn would go to the living room and a left turn would come down our hall.
Passing Maisy’s room first.
I launch out of bed because the footsteps aren’t vanishing into the dining room. They are headed this way.
I scan the shadows in my room for anything resembling a weapon. Thoughts fire at the speed of light. Why don’t I sleep with a baseball bat? Wait. Do we even own a baseball bat? I grab a wooden coat hanger that dangles from the closet knob. It’s one of Nanna’s. The old school kind for coats, and it’s heavy and bulky in my hand. A blow to the nose with this would buy me time.
Stepping soundlessly, I poke my head out into the hall, and my heart plunges to my knees.
The silhouette of a man stands motionless at the rear of the foyer, tucked in the shadow of the stairs. He’s closer to Maisy’s door than I am.
Nothing else penetrates. I take off at a run, getting to Maisy my only goal.
I’m two paces from her door when he wheels around.
“Stella?” he whispers.
I freeze, my coat hanger bludgeon raised over my head.
The silhouette steps forward into the beam of streetlight from the front door’s transom, revealing Lark. Shirtless. In pajama pants.
“Oh, God,” I gasp, bracing against my knees, my heart racing. “I thought I’d have to fight you.”
I’m hiss-whispering, now right outside of Maisy’s door, and Lark moves close enough for me to read the confusion on his face.
“What?”
My mouth is dry, my limbs are jelly. But I shake my head, straighten up, and lead him away from her room.
“You scared the hell out of me,” I rasp as we move toward the living room. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry.” I hear genuine regret in his voice. “My window unit died. It’s broiling in my room. I was coming to crash in here.” He gestures a thumb toward the living room.
I stare at him for a second, the light from the transom illuminating his look of discomfort.
“But…” I frown, remembering what I saw. “Why were you just standing there?”
Lark raises a hand and drags it down his face.
I wait.
His brows are knit.
“Do I have to answer that?”
My pulse spikes again, and I grip the coat hanger tighter. “You were standing six feet from my daughter’s room in the middle of the night,” I hiss hotly. “Yeah, you need to answer.”
His eyes bulge like they could launch out of his head, and he staggers back. “What?! Shit, no.” Both hands go to his scalp this time, his spine bowing like he’s been punched in the stomach.
Guilt tugs at my sleeve but I brush it off. I won’t feel guilty for being protective—even paranoid—about Maisy’s safety.
“Stella, no fucking way.” He sounds sickened.
I believe him. Even with panic still careening through my blood, I believe him. I still need an explanation.
“So, what were you doing?”
Lark doesn’t blink.
“Honestly?” He straightens, but his hands slide only to the back of his neck, his bare chest, defined triceps, and the dark hair of his armpits making him look both virile and vulnerable. “I was standing here… fighting the urge to go to you.”
Holy curling irons.
Everything stops. Time. Breath. Thoughts.
“Wh-What?”
Lark groans and drags the heels of his hands over his eyes. “That sounds awful. I swear—” Now he stacks both hands over his heart, eyes on mine. “I swear, I never would have done it.”
Despite his promise, I picture him coming to my room. Of me waking up as he slips under the covers.
Even in nothing but my cami top and PJ bottoms, I go hot all over.
This feeling that I’ve been struggling to avoid, that I’ve been fighting to deny, refuses to be denied any longer. I could go back to my room and hide behind a locked door, but I already know the door and that lock couldn’t keep any of this out.
Lark’s gaze is stricken, his hands still over his heart. “Please say something,” he whispers. “Tell me you know I wouldn’t take advantage of you like that.”
I take a step forward. “I—” I swallow. Do I know it?
I think about the man in front of me who drops everything to rescue his threatened roommate. Who cradles his three-month-old niece with a burp rag on his shoulder. Who was willing to allow my four-year-old to keep the two hundred dollar rock she’d lifted from his room. Who has offered to help me launch my business.
“I know that.”
He drops his hands from his chest and exhales, relief clear in the slope of his shoulders, his sculpted, flawless shoulders.
“But—” I take another step forward.
Awareness ripples over his gaze, and shame slips off him like an unknotted cloak. Lark takes a step closer to me.
I raise my right hand and let my fingers land on his wrist with a feather-light touch. “What if I can’t forget you said it?”
The question has barely left my lips before his slam into them.
The contact is an erotic shock. A collision of pure pleasure and surprise. His rough hands capture my face and draw me closer with a cautious tugging. Mine answer by falling to his chest, my fingers fanning over his bare skin.
Lark shivers under my touch, and I get to relish the response only a moment before his tongue parts my lips. When I open for him and his tongue glides over mine, everything else falls away except the discovery. His taste is silvery like rain water, rarified by sun and air and clouds. And as I slide my tongue around his, my one thought is, Of course. This is the only way he could taste.
One of his hands moves into my hair, cupping the back of my head. When he pulls me deeper, my whole body responds. I moan.
He inhales roughly at the sound, his chest swelling beneath my hands. I draw them over his pecs. When my fingertips read the Braille of one puckered nipple, I learn two things: One: I want to lick that nipple. Two: Lark sounds like a wolf when I touch that nipple.
“Stella,” he growls against my mouth.
But that’s the only word because our mouths seal against each other again. Keeping that one hand in my hair, his other glides down, over my shoulder blade, down to grip my waist. Ducking under the hem of my top, he flattens his fingers against my back while his thumb traces my side. The touch sends fuzzy shockwaves clear to my clit. I shudder hopelessly.
His taste. His touch. This tension. It’s all both new and somehow known. Even through my denial that it could be at all, I knew that it would be just like this.
And how could I not? We’ve been sparking against each other like jumper cables for weeks.
Except… it’s so much more.
More heat. More hunger. More him.
I run my hands down the musc
led terrain of his back, drawing a moan from him. Lark’s mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to my neck. The hand at my waist tugs me closer, and the hard shaft of his erection is my pleasure and pride.
And, God, I can’t get enough. I need more. Yet what I need can’t happen here in the front hall. With my body overwhelmed with sensation, my brain pinballs between options. Bedroom? Desire screams, Yes! But executive functioning lays down a disapproving No.
Frustrated with both, I clasp Lark by the wrist at my waist, break the kiss, and tug him wordlessly toward the living room. He doesn’t hesitate, but he also doesn’t take his eyes off mine. Even in the moonlight, the look he’s giving me could turn sugar crystals into syrup.
I only step on one of Maisy’s stuffed animals—the turtle, I’m guessing—but since turtles don’t really make noise, there’s no squeaker, thank God.
And with virtually no effort at all, I’m on my back on Nanna’s couch, Lark’s delicious weight on top of me. I draw my knees up, and he sinks into the cradle of my thighs, pressing his hard length against my soft knot of nerves.
Good God. No one else has touched me there in years. I’m dizzy. Humming.
“Is this okay?” he asks between kisses.
It is so much more than okay, I have a hard time forming words.
“Mmm mmm-hmm.”
His chuckle is a tickle against my neck, and his right hand finds the back of my left thigh. “God, you’re so soft.” He says it like it hurts him. “I’ve wanted to touch you forever.”
At this confession, the skin across my breastbone feels too tight and too light at the same time. He props himself on his left elbow, gazing down at me. I can see well enough to read his hesitation.
I run my fingers up and down his ribs. “What is it?”
Lark’s eyes are so defenseless, I raise a hand to his cheek.
“Have you thought about this?” he asks.
I smile at the bald question and giggle when it makes me want to hide my face in the gold upholstery. His brow arches, but a smile tugs at those lips. “Is that a yes or a no?”
I laugh and again draw him down to kiss him. It feels safer to have him this close while I risk the truth. “Yes. I’ve thought about this,” I whisper.
His exhale is audible, a gruff breath of relief and gratification, and then he kisses me hard, grinds into me harder. I light up like the Eiffel Tower. And because I like what this does to him, I give him more.
“Since that first day,” I admit against his lips.
“Mmmm.” His moan is a shot of bliss filled to the rim. If I could, I’d order a flight of them.
Chapter Seventeen
LARK
Is this really happening?
Or am I having a fever dream—a wet fever dream—because my AC is out?
God, please let this be happening.
Even though it shouldn’t. I know it shouldn’t. I promised Stella I wouldn’t cross this line. And I wouldn’t have.
Except she crossed it first. I think.
And now that her soft body is beneath me, and I’ve captured the taste of those teasing lips, I want to erase every line that ever ran between us.
“Stella.” I breathe her name behind the shell of her ear because she’s letting me. Her breath catches in the most ball-tightening way. I want to touch her. I want to taste her.
But more than touching and tasting, I want to give to her.
I want to be the reason Stella loses her breath, stutters her words, and cries out in desire.
I want that here and now. If she lets me go there.
Her fingertips trace up and down my back, and it feels incredible. Both sweet and sexy. Both innocent and sinful. But it doesn’t tell me what she likes or what she’d let me do, so I move my mouth from her ear down the side of her neck, kissing hard.
Stella unspools for me, tilting her head the other way and granting me access. I graze my teeth along her taut skin and then close them gently on her collarbone.
“Oh, God, Lark,” she rasps, and I swear, the way she says my name sends all my blood due south.
I want to bite through the thin strap of her top, but I wrestle that impulse under control and slip a pinky beneath it instead. I draw back to watch her expression as I slide the strap off her shoulder. When she doesn’t protest, doesn’t raise a yellow flag, just keeps her eyes on mine, I slowly tug the fabric lower, again letting her know my intention.
As the top of her cami skims over the pert peak of her nipple, both of us gasp. Even in the curtain-filtered moonlight, the sight of her bare breast sends a shock of wonder through me.
How am I here? What the hell did I do to deserve to be here?
No sensible answer arrives, but deserved or not, I take what she’s giving me. Cupping the plump flesh, I run my eager thumb over her budded nipple and draw a hint of whimper from Stella.
Jesus Christ. My dick is a fucking slab of lead pressed into her thigh.
My heart pounds so hard, I’m afraid Pen can hear it all the way in the attic.
I lick my lips. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”
“Wh-What?”
I’m drunk on her beauty but not too far gone to miss that I’ve made her stutter again. I must be doing something right.
“You heard me,” I rumble, and then take her lovely breast into my mouth and suck deep. Her breath tears from her, and Stella writhes under me.
Yeah, I’m definitely doing something right.
And, right now, all I want in the world is to keep doing it. I want to give her all the pleasure I can wring out of this moment.
I suck her hard again, and Stella’s back arches off the sofa, her breath sharp. A third time, and her fingers dig into my back.
When I release the luscious breast, Stella pants, almost in relief. Until I mouth the other.
Gasping, arching, digging all commence again. My eyes want to roll back into my skull as she grinds against me. That heat is her mons, her pussy, her clit all seeking my length, my arousal, my cock.
I need to make her come.
Somewhere in the bog of my mind, I wonder at the soundness of this thought. Our first kiss was minutes ago, but the moment feels urgent. As though if I don’t bring her to climax now, I’ll never have the chance again. But if I do…
If I do…
She’ll let me do it again.
Still lapping and suckling her breast, I trail the fingers of my right hand down her side until I reach the bottom of her cami. I work my fingers beneath the fabric and touch the silken skin of her belly. It feels so private, so sacred, I moan around her breast.
As though answering me, Stella’s hands glide from my shoulder blades to my ribs, coaxing more pleasure. As long as they stay there, it won’t drive me over the edge. But this isn’t about to be Follow-the-Leader.
I slowly sweep my fingertips down until they nudge at the elastic of her PJ bottoms. I run them along the band, again, letting her know my intention.
“Lark?” Her whisper sounds uncertain.
We can’t have that.
I release her breast with a gentle suck and move my mouth up her neck to her ear.
“Stella,” I whisper back with no trace of doubt. But I don’t breach the elastic. I just glide my fingertips back and forth, back and forth. “If you tell me to stop, know that I will stop. Even though it would be the last thing I want to do.”
She says nothing, but her fingers continue to paint rainbows down my sides. I’m pretty sure this is what heaven feels like.
I press another kiss along her neck. Being here, this close to her, feels like a gift, and I want to give back. Seeking her mouth again, I kiss her deep. Yes, this is a gift. As hidden and hard-won as a Red Beryl in Wildhorse Springs, Utah. Rare and precious. Breath-taking.
Stella angles the kiss and moves to my jaw. Her kisses are the sweetest touch. Her lips come to my ear.
“In case you’re wondering, this is me not telling you to stop.”
My chuckle is so ro
ugh with arousal, I barely recognize it. “I like it.”
She kisses my cheek. “I like you.”
My heart squeezes. It’s almost painful. And it’s also maybe the best feeling I’ve ever had.
“Oh, Stella.”
I draw back and look down at her again. It means something. Way more than I could have guessed. Because I know she didn’t like me at first. Didn’t want me here.
But I’ve wanted her to like me from the moment my eyes landed on her. I have wanted to be allowed this close.
“Baby, I like you, too.”
Compared to what I feel and what her words mean to me—unsought, freely given—my words don’t feel like enough. And the wish to give more swells inside me so big it threatens to crack my ribs.
Now that our eyes are locked, I’m not looking away. And I don’t miss the fluttering of her lashes as I slip my hand into her panties.
My fingertips brush against damp curls, and I nearly lose it. “God, Stella.” When she rolls her hips and presses herself against my touch, I moan.
Fuck, that’s hot.
I edge lower. Slick softness and heat meet my fingers, and Stella’s eyelids dip. I know the moment my middle finger crests her clit. All at once, her head tips back and her chest rises.
“Jesus, Lark,” she rasps. Her fingers sink into the hair at the back of my head, and she grabs a handful.
I’m the one making her feel like this. She’s saying my name, and I love it.
I want to spend days figuring out what she likes. Where she aches to be kissed. What makes her lose control. Maybe I’ve rushed where I should have lingered, but I’m not regretting the fact that I’m gliding the pads of my middle and ring fingers over the stem of her clit, making her breath come short.
Her eyes close, and I smother another moan when she bites her bottom lip.
“God, you’re beautiful.”
Her eyes open, this time with effort, and she focuses on me. The look in her eyes grips me. It’s this look of surprised recognition that matches exactly what I feel.
I want to be inside her.
Hell, I want to be all in, but I know that can’t happen. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
So I slip these two fingers inside and straddle her clit with my index and thumb. One pump inside her silken heat and her hips come off the sofa.
Dream House Page 19