“Take it,” he demands roughly, his body knifing through the water as he brings himself to me.
I want to savor this.
All the world shimmers as I raise my hands, slowly, to cradle either side of his face. He closes his eyes at the contact, shuddering out a breath. Then Morgan lowers his head, and we simply stand like this for a small eternity, breathing and feeling, mouths tantalizingly close but not yet touching.
His focus rocks from my eyes to my mouth. As if he can no longer resist, our lips meet at last.
First, soft.
Then, the sweetest burn.
It is such deep pleasure, the rasp of his stubble. The flick ofhis tongue across the seam of my lips, bidding me to open up. And I do. I had thought, in the moments when I allowed myself to dream of this, that it would be bright colors, frenzy, like the man himself. But his touch is restrained, contemplating each deliberate action before his fingertips skim my shoulders, settle in my hair; as ifhe’sdreamed that this moment would be quiet and composed, like me.
So I tilt my head, moving into his body with more pressure, more heat, less inhibition—to make our moment a perfect synthesis of us both.
He guides my touch down his throat, to his chest, to his arms, wanting me everywhere.
“I love these,” I confess, tracing the tattoos on his left biceps. “What made you want the stars?”
He watches me explore his body, his eyes feverish. “Stars were the prettiest things I’d seen, at the time that I got them put on me.” Morgan leans in again, catches my lower lip delicately between his teeth. Lets go, and drops kisses to the corner of my mouth, the pulsing spot at the hinge of my jaw, the hollow of my clavicle. “That’s changed.”
I pull him to me, and kiss him harder.
Water rolls from the top of his head off the tip of his nose. It forms jewels at the ends of his hair. They collect on the swells of my breasts, snaking down between them into the black pool. His eyes track the journey, transparent with hunger. I can see the slip and swirl of water reflected in them.
He is magnetic and effortlessly eye-drawing and impossible not to become obsessed with. How did I let this happen? I know better.
“You can take more, if you want it,” I murmur into his ear.
“If I want it,” he repeats thickly. “You have no idea. Youarethe wordwant. You in this pool, for the rest of my life. That’s what I’ll think of any time I hear the wordwant.”
Morgan’s warm body shifts to press against me from behind, and a little moan escapes my lips. I let my head roll back to rest against his chest, and a pair of hands skate down my ribs. I know so much better, and yet I don’t care.
A knuckle brushes between my legs. And again. Barely there, just a flutter. I can feel his hard length against my backside and I want so badly to touch him but he pins my hands against my stomach and doesn’t let me.
“Please,” I say.
Morgan’s laugh is soft and wicked, murmuring into my skin. And then his ministrations halt. I stiffen, opening my eyes. Something must have caught his attention.
But then he says, in a rough scrape, “You believe me now, don’t you?”
“Believe what?”
His mouth presses a kiss to my spine, between my shoulder blades, and he lets go of a little sigh that I feel in my inner ears, between each rib, the back of my throat.
“Look at what I’ve gone and done, making myself my own biggest obstacle,” he mutters bitterly, then resumes what he was doing previously with a dedication that can only be described as worshipful. I melt against him, boneless…
And he stops again.
I’m going to come out of my skin. “Morgan.”
“Shhh.”
His arms encircle my body in a protective way. A way that makes my muscles seize and my heart flip for entirely different reasons. I blink the film of lust from my eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Morgan brings his lips to my ear. “I heard something.”
I open my mouth to respond but fall still when there’s a light crunch in the grasses not far from where we stand, vulnerable and naked in the water.
