A laugh strums through me and echoes around us like a throng of happy ghosts. “So it’s a no-go on the nude, huh?”
“Perhaps not tonight.” His eyes stay trained on mine with a veiled promise of things to come, in a not-so-distant future, and that fire in my belly roars back to life. Abel is always setting me ablaze whether he knows it or not.
“Tomorrow sounds great to me.” I move in an inch, and he does the same. “Do gentlemen traditionally kiss their dates?”
His cheeks twitch in lieu of a smile. His electric blue eyes bear into me like heated sirens. “They sure do.” Abel leans in, closing his eyes, and I memorize the magic of this moment. His lips touch over mine, soft as summer rain, and I open for him like a flower. Abel is in me, dominating me, loving me with that lashing, thrashing, oven-heated tongue. His fingers secure themselves over my hips, and the impression of each fingertip stokes the fire in me ten times hotter than before. It’s safe to say that Abel McCarthy’s shining gift is loving women with that oven-hot mouth of his.
A deep groan rips from me, working its way up my throat, and Abel strums a quiet laugh that reverberates through us both. My hands find their way to his chest, and I take in the hard lines, the cut ridges of his abs, his lats as they circle around to the smooth skin of his back. Abel is built like a brick, like a linebacker, a wrestler. And if his body weren’t amazing enough, his ability to invoke the beginnings of a very promising orgasm in me is like nothing I have experienced before.
My legs circle around his, before riding up and wrapping themselves around his back again. I can feel his hardness growing, and I can’t help but smile. This is where we should be. There is no doubt in my mind that Abel and I are destined to be together in the most delicious, primal way. My hand glides down to his trunks, and he catches me as if I were a criminal.
“Whoa.” He backs up, panting, that smile still twitching on and off like a Christmas tree light. “I’m a gentleman, and you are a lady.” He frowns into this as if both were the greatest offense, and, at the moment, they are.
“Well”—I pluck my hand free from his stronghold—“I guess that will have to wait for another time, too. A gentleman eventually gives in to the desires of a lady, does he not?”
Abel sighs as he glances skyward. “That he does.” He sinks below the waterline and wraps his arms around my waist, speeding us back toward the falls.
“Abel!” I scream, laughing hard as he runs us through the wall of water over and over again.
Abel and I lounge in that aqua marine bath, we race one another from one end of that emerald lagoon to the other, we float on our backs and count the stars as they make their appearance. We hold hands and float in and out of those beautiful falls as if it were our job, our destiny. But best of all, Abel and I exchange soft, fervent kisses like a gentleman and a lady—like a couple of overzealous teenagers.
Abel is reshaping my world one precious kiss at a time. He’s reshaping the idea of who I am and who I want to be—who I should have been all along. He makes me feel beautiful, safe, and wanted. A trifecta of emotions that no one since my father, my mother, has been able to invoke in me.
Abel has infiltrated the deepest, darkest corridor of my heart, and that’s the most dangerous place of all to linger.
I should know.
After all, there is a body count.
