Okay. This was happening.
No big deal.
He’d kissed women before.
Heaps of women.
He liked kissing.
He liked it just fine.
He definitely never feltnervousabout it, like some monumental life outcome was riding on how well he did. On how she felt. On if she liked it.
Kissing was… kissing. Not rocket science.
But this was Sienna, and even the slightest touch with her was loaded with their backstory. Their history. What they’d meant to each other, once upon a time.
How he’d hurt her.
How he’dknownhe was hurting her, how she’d cried, and how that had only hardened his resolve to get the hell out of there. Because if he weakened then, he would weaken forever, and his chance to escape, to get Blake and his mom out of town, to put them on the path to the future they needed to get away from their dad, it would all have disappeared.
But you’d have had Sienna, a voice that had dogged him for over a decade reminded him sharply.
That was the trade-off, back then. Sienna, and his life in Ashbury Falls, or a scholarship at a college with one of the best hockey programmes out there, the kind of programme that all but guaranteed a chance at the big time.
It had ripped him apart to hurt Sienna though, to know that she’d probably hate him forever because of the way his leaving betrayed everything they’d promised each other.
He would never make that mistake again.
‘I’m going to kiss you,’ he said, slowly, his voice deep. Dark. Gruff. Flooded with all the feelings he usually repressed. ‘But here’s the deal, Mastrangelo.’
‘I’m listening, Carter.’
‘We’re here a week. A kiss now, a kiss then. Who knows what else might happen? I am not going to hurt you again.’ He pressed a finger beneath her chin, tilting her face to his. ‘If you think, for even one second, this is getting out of hand, you tell me and we walk away then and there. Got it?’
Her eyes flashed to his, something like a warning in the depths of her gaze. ‘You’re not going to hurt me,’ she promised, inching closer, so it was Sienna who stood onto her tiptoes and pressed her wet, curvaceous body against his. ‘You just don’t have that power any more.’
He hoped to God she was right. No matter what, wild horses wouldn’t hold him back from this. From leaning down, as she pressed up, from letting his lips get closer and closer to hers. The weight of what they were about to do was hard against his chest, making breathing almost impossible. Every other kiss they’d shared fractured inside his mind like a kaleidoscope of multicolour and glitter. Their first kiss had flooded him with nerves. But it was nothing compared to this.
It’s just a kiss. Pull yourself together.
But weirdly, it didn’tfeellike just a kiss. It felt important. Weighty. Like their whole past was somehow about to be reignited, in a way he desperately didn’t want, yet, despite that, he didn’t draw back. Even then, he didn’t listen to common sense and tell her this was a damned stupid idea.
How could he?
How could he when kissing her was the thing he wanted most on earth?
* * *
In the end, she had no doubts. No hesitancy. No concerns. She was fatalistic about the need to do this, to taste him, to dip a little way back in time and see how it felt. To see if he still stirred her body to fever pitch, if he kissed the same as she remembered. In the end, it was Sienna who closed the distance between them and claimed his mouth with her own, who pressed her body to his, who lifted a hand to his chest and pressed it there, fingers splayed wide over the Titans tattoo, right beneath his heart.
She was intentional about it, as if to say to him: it’s just a kiss, it doesn’t matter. But itdidmatter, and she realised that the second he took over, shifting his body weight so he could bring an arm around behind her back and hold her tighter against him, tilting her a little so he had better access to her mouth, so that his kiss wasn’t just a touching of lips but an invasion of every single one of her senses, as his tongue slipped into her mouth, flicking her own, teasing her, making her body tremble with the power he clearly still had – if not to hurt her, to stir her desire to an indescribable peak.
A moan rose inside her, but Sienna refused to give it voice. She refused to sayanything,even his name. She refused to tell him how good this felt, how much she liked being kissed by him, even when those words were spinning around and around and around in her mind.
Rational thought was still a part of Sienna, a lifeline she clung to, when her senses were scattering into disarray. A lifeline, a reminder that she had to control this, even when she wanted to lose control completely, to drag him to the shallows, lie down in the gently lapping waves and beg him to ravish her. To take her. To make her his.
It was an alarming thought, and it burst through her like a lightning bolt might spike the sky. She blinked, and pulled away from him abruptly, her breath ragged even when she tried to control it.
