“Maybe.”
“You claimed you hated it.”
Rafe turned toward me so quickly I nearly walked into him, and then he pulled me behind one of the enormous fake ficus trees near the lobby fountain and stood so close my breath became his breath.
“I did hate it, because I thought you’d written it for someone else. I was angry as fuck that you’d felt that way for someone who didn’t deserve it. For someone who wasn’tme.”
I swallowed hard. His mouth was literal inches from mine. In all the time I’d known him, we’d never been this close, and we’d never had this honesty between us.
“You think you deserve it?” I whispered back.
“I think there’s not a person in this world who cares about you more than me… so yes.”
“Even when you hated me?”
“Even when I told myself I hated you.”
I licked my lips. I knew exactly,exactlywhat he meant because I felt the same. “We need to be upstairs. Immediately.”
“Yeah?” He smoothed the backs of his fingers over my stomach, and my knees shook. “You sure you don’t need any more tequila to finish our talk?”
I shook my head. “I’m feeling really talkative already. For example, would you like me to tell you what I want to do to you upstairs?”
Rafe drew a shaky breath, and his eyes went half-lidded. “How do you feel about public indecency?” He reached down to adjust himself. “Fuck.”
I pulled him out from behind the tree and pointed him toward the elevators. “Oh, we will,” I promised. Then I gave him a gentle shove to get him moving.
When we got upstairs, though, and the door to Rafe’s room slammed shut behind us, some of my confidence faded. Not that I wanted him any less, but God, it felt so monumental. Fated or something. And I badly didn’t want to mess it up.
“So, did you want to talk about Aimee more? Or about why I—”
Rafe answered my question by pushing me up against the door and crowding me with his body like he had downstairs. Except this time, he didn’t stop until he was flush against me, and I could feel the hard length of his cock rubbing against mine.
Both of us gasped.
Rafe sifted his fingers into the hair at the back of my neck and tugged gently, forcing my head back.
“If you want to talk,” he ground out, “we can talk. But right now, I’d rather—”
I surged forward, pushing his back against the door to the closet, and kissed him.
This was a thing I’d thought about a lot. As in, it had been my predominant sexual fantasy—thestartof the fantasy, anyway—from the time I was a teenager, and I’d imagined this happening a hundred times in a hundred different ways. In the secret cove on the beach in Whispering Key, in Rafe’s bedroom, on his inflatable Sea Eagle, on his dad’s boat. Later, in my apartment in New York. Or—in a taboo favorite from my personal spank bank—in front of the entire town of Whispering Key, once I’d come home with my billions of Grammys, bought the biggest house on the island, and shown Rafe the error of his ways.
But now that it was actually happening, I realized that none of those scenarios had been close to correct, because in all of them, kissing had been the prelude—the warm-up scales before I started singing, the opening act at a concert. In reality, though, kissing Rafe Goodman was main stage, sellout crowd. It was holding a note and feeling the perfection of it resonate in my chest.
In short, it was everything.
I lifted both hands and threaded them through the hair over Rafe’s ears, holding him in place just in case he was thinking of moving anytime this century, and Rafe made a rough rumbling noise from the back of his throat—something that managed to be forceful and needy all at once. He licked into my mouth, owning it, and I gave myself over to it.
“Fuck,” he growled, spinning me around so I was against the wall again, before pulling back to pant against my neck. “You taste like honey and tequila.”
“Is that good?” I asked, mostly to keep him talking. To say I liked the twin feelings of his voice vibrating under my hands and his breath flaring hot against my skin was to greatly understate the truth.
He bit down gently on my earlobe. “It’s fucking delicious. Makes me want to taste you fuckingeverywhere.”
“By all means, you should, ah… do that,” I said in a voice that sounded a hundred times gravellier than my usual voice. “Now-ish-ly.”
Rafe pulled his face back a couple of inches to look at me. “It’s been how many years, Jay Don, and suddenly you’re in a rush?”
