Before I could flee the room and slam the door on what I’d done, he grabbed my hand.
“Was it?” He sucked two of my fingers into his mouth, the same two fingers I’d used to get myself off.
His sinful tongue stroked them, and the drag of those full lips over my knuckles shuddered fevered memories throughout my body at what else he could do with that mouth. He eased my fingers out, and the slow slide of his lips over my flesh ignited my center once again.
“It doesn’t taste like a mistake to me.” He sat up at the same time he pulled me down to sit next to him.
“I’m sorry,” I said without looking at him. “I took advantage of you, and...I’m sorry.”
It seemed I was developing a pattern of sneaking into men’s bedrooms at night. Since Rick was physically scarred while in the line of duty, dangerous, rugged, and unconditionally forbidden due to our nine-year age gap, my whole sixteen-year-old world began to revolve around him while he stayed with us during his summer internship. He knew Dad from a high school aerospace engineering work study program, and Dad thought he could get him a job before Max Cleary wooed Rick into becoming a senator. While Rick stayed with us, I welcomed his lustful stares, awoke gasping every morning with thoughts of his hands on my skin, until things spiraled out of control between us. That was before I realized what he really was—cold, heartless, andmarried.
I’d wanted to blame my sexual curiosity on a hormonal imbalance, but my doctor, and later Dr. Morrison in college, had confirmed everything was normal. Then why weren’t all sixteen-year-olds climbing into bed with older men and later popping out babies? Inside my barely existent social circle in Wichita, it was just me.
Maybe Dad had been right—maybe I was wicked.
Sam scooted forward to brush his fingers across the back of my neck and gently turned my face into his palm. “Don’t be sorry.”
The backs of my eyes burned, and I quickly looked away. What kind of kick to the self-esteem would it be to be given a blow job, then have the girl cry all over the place like a blubbering idiot from guilt?
His fingers skimmed slow and gentle toward my chin and turned me once again to face him. “How much did you have to drink tonight?”
I shook my head, and the room tipped. My stomach bubbled with nausea. I couldn’t even begin to count how many glasses of wine I’d had.
Something so sad and haunted rolled across his face with a wince that it broke my heart all over again. He scrubbed a hand down his face then searched the floor for a pair of boxers.
“Come on,” he said, hauling me to my feet. “You need to sleep it off.”
He ushered me in front of him toward my room, safely tucked away in his boxers. He turned the light on and folded back the blankets on my bed for me.
Since I’d gone to the cowboy bar dressed for bed, I crawled in and burrowed under the covers as if to disappear. I didn’t deserve his compassion, but it flooded me with a warmth more intense than alcohol and sex combined.
When I was settled, he slid the glasses from my nose and set them on top of the nightstand. Then he brought me a trashcan from the bathroom and said, “Sleep on your side.”
I nodded and assumed the position, but a bounce on the bed clued me in that I wasn’t alone. He was climbing under the covers with me.
Under my wide-eyed stare, he paused. “I just want to make sure you don’t die. Just sleeping, okay?”
“Yeah.”
His nearness and the sound of his voice sank my eyes closed with a shiver. He was such a good, sweet person, so unlike Rick in every way, and the more I got to know him, the clearer that became. I wasn’t so sure I deserved someone like him, but if I let it, it could be too easy to let my heart get as carried away as my body and fall in love with him.
What a terrifying, exhilarating experience that would be.
