I paused at the door, waited. “You were what, Ryder?”
He winced and gave me a look pleading for something. Maybe forgiveness. Maybe patience.
“I was missing you.” That, said so low and soft, it was like a feather against my spine. “And I thought...and I thought maybe hearing your voice...” He shrugged one shoulder, whatever words he’d been about to say gone.
My heart gathered up those words like a bee did nectar. But my mind was still giving that clear thinking thing a try.
“You asked me if I was naked.”
“You thought I was drunk.”
“Well?”
“It was eight o’clock in the morning.” He reached over and shoved the door, springing it open. “I was not drunk.”
“You could have been.”
“In what time zone?”
“The drunk one.”
He snorted and shut the door behind us. I was standing in Ryder’s house, with Ryder.
Last time we’d been here, one of us had been naked.
That one of us had been him.
My mind wandered over the memory of his body, his hard muscles, the sepia Leonardo da Vinci hand proportion sketch tattooed on his shoulder, the stars and artist’s compass on his hip.
“I had just finished a meeting. Investors on a project in Seattle. Coffee?”
“It’s a little late for coffee.”
He took three quick steps forward. “Who are you and what have you done to Delaney?” He pressed the back of his hand on my forehead as if checking for a fever.
The warmth and pressure of that contact pulled a small gasp from me.
He was smiling, gazing down at me, so close I could smell his cologne worn and thickened by a long day against his skin, but made all the better by his unique scent mixed into it.
His eyes crinkled at the corners, laughter dancing in their depth.
“I’m right here,” I breathed.
The glint of humor shifted, grew into something else. Heat. Desire. Need.
His hand hovered, drawing fingers that gentled across my forehead, down my temple, then dragged along my jaw and slipped around to the base of my head. Fingers stroked my hair which was falling free from the hasty pony tail I’d put it in hours ago.
His gaze searched mine, asking.
I didn’t know what I answered, but he tipped his head, angling his mouth nearer, nearer mine. I kept my eyes open for as long as I could.
“Delaney,” he whispered, his breath warm across my lips.
I leaned, lifted, reached, just that fraction of an inch so that our mouths met.
Distantly, I felt his free hand slide around my waist. Distantly, I felt my hands skim across his ribs, my palms flattening on the wide, smooth planes of his back.
What I felt, what my whole world seemed to center on, where I began, where I ended, was that kiss.
