I cursed under my breath. He wasn’t wrong, even if he was sending mixed signals. “You’re right.” I brushed past him, aiming for the door to the cabin. “I’ll just go to bed now.”
He reached out and stopped me. “Wait.”
I faced him. His chest rose and fell rapidly as he took my hand and brought it to his heart.
“Okay,” he said, terror flashing through his intelligent eyes. “I’ll make love to you.”
“You don’t have to. We’ve been drinking. It’s a stupid idea.”
He closed his eyes, exhaling through his nose. He raised my hand to his lips. “It’s not a stupid idea. It scares me, but I would be honored to be the first person to make love to you.”
Every time I thought I had a handle on Sawyer, he showed me something new. “Okay.”
Sawyer led me to his bedroom and kissed my forehead, a gesture so sweet it melted me to my core. He leaned in to kiss my mouth, grabbing the edge of my T-shirt. After pulling it over my head, he immediately went back to kissing. As he worked off my jeans, he kissed my nose and my eyelids. “You are so beautiful,” he whispered in my ear.
I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to sweet-talk me, that I was a sure thing, à la Julia Roberts inPretty Woman. But my typical snark felt like cowardice in the face of his bravery. So I let him continue his murmurs as he dropped my jeans and underwear to the floor.
“Shit,” I said, smiling against his lips. “I’ve got to get out of these boots.”
He face-palmed and dropped to one knee. “Sorry, I’m usually a little better with logistics.” He kissed the tip of my cock, which swelled in response. Pushing up the hem of my jeans, he untied one boot and then the other, quickly removing them along with the rest of my clothing. When he stood up, his cheeks were red.
“Are you seriously embarrassed about forgetting my shoes?”
“Yeah, I am,” he said with a smile. “I guess I just don’t have any game with you.”
I thought of his armory of perfectly tailored suits. He’d been protecting his heart fromme. “Sure you do,” I said, tugging up his shirt. “And I don’t think I’m looking for game tonight anyway.”
He kissed me again and whipped off his long-sleeved tee, then made quick work of his jeans and underwear. We stood naked in front of each other, a little awkward. I reached out to touch hisribs, where I remembered he had a tiny fine line tattoo in gray. “I saw that you had a tattoo here, but I never asked what it was.”
He covered my hand with his. “It’s a quote fromWuthering Heights. I had a serious Brontë phase in college,” he said, oddly self-deprecating.
Maybe it was just odd because I’d never seen him embarrassed about anything. Ever. “What’s the quote?”
He took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Sawyer would never put anything on his body that didn’t have a deep meaning. There was a damn good chance that the quote he’d chosen had to do with me.
Faced with the seriousness of that revelation, my first instinct was to tell a joke, to divert us away from this vulnerable conversation. But I couldn’t do that to Sawyer. Not now.
I was ashamed to realize that, until that very moment, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about whathemight need. Suddenly, I had to know what his other needs were. I was desperate to find out if anyone,anyone at all, had ever given him what he needed. Or was he always the one doing for others, never thinking about himself?
Yeah, that sounded about right.
“God, I’m going to need a fucking step stool if I want to make out with you,” I said, as we angled to kiss again. “Can’t have you putting a crick in your neck.”
“Darn.” He smiled. “We’ll just have to go to bed.”
“Guess so,” I said, happy to see his mood lighten.
He went to the bed and dragged me down on top of him. I nestled between his strong legs, and he pulled me in for a kiss, parting my lips with his tongue as his hands roamed my body.
I had gotten the sense that he really, really liked my ass, and not just because he’d had his tongue in it more times than I could count. I pressed my butt into his hands, and he tightened his grip. I’d have fingertip bruises in the morning, and damn if I didn’t want to have them tattooed there.
Kissing like this, though? Wrapped up in each other? I wondered, not for the first time, how much I’d missed out on, bypassing affection to go straight for sex.
The combination of his kisses and his hands and the way his long legs trapped me against him… it brought me back to our conversation about feeling worthy. In this moment, with all of his heady attention, I did feel worthy. Or at least I didn’t feel like a shitheel.
I needed more assurance, though.
