“Your eyelids.”
“Oh.” He swallowed. “They’re fine.”
“Healing okay?”
“I…I can’t feel anything with your hands on me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, although she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for.
“Don’t be. I can’t feel anything bad. Just you, Doc.”
That brought things screeching to a halt. Doc. What am I doing? Her brain screamed again, while her lips said, “Call me George.”
“Don’t be sorry, George. I’m not.”
“No?”
He smirked. “Oh, I’m sorry about a lotta shit, but not this. Not coming here. Not you.” He covered one of her hands with his and, with the other, reached out, around her, to circle her back and pull her tighter to him, and that, that set her on fire.
Nerve endings waking up like wavy little sea anemones, heads prickling painfully along skin that had gone dead from disuse.
“Give me a kiss,” he demanded, and as she watched, he softened, his gaze running a tender path from her lips to her eyes and back again. “Please kiss me.”
In a dream, nowhere near herself, she did.
It was gentle at first, despite the raging fire inside. A touch of lips, dry but soft—feverish, almost. There were smells mingled with that contact, new scents that shouldn’t feel so intimate. A face, a cheek, a jaw. A confusion of sensations with just one touch. His tongue was sensual and slow. She gave in to her urge to open her eyes, and when she did, she met his, the dark brown almost gone, eaten up by his pupils despite the bright, sterile light.
Lips, teeth, tongue, the slide of chins and noses—it was the purest, cleanest, rightest thing she’d felt in her life.
How odd, in the midst of so much unfamiliar sensation, that her mind should wander again to her marriage—her first kiss with Tom. She’d been clammy back then, with desire, which was such an odd contrast, such a strange thing to recognize. But here, this man, was heat, scorching heat, urgency so hot it cauterized the guilt.
With a growl, he sank back, nudged and pulled until somehow she wound up in his lap on the exam table, straddling him. Closeness, new and unexpected, sent a searing flush to the surface of her skin. She remembered the last time she’d done this, the last time she’d kissed someone with intent to do more, and it brought a wave of unwanted emotions. Regret, sadness, worry that whatever this was, it was wrong—cheating on a husband long gone.
George sucked in a hiccuping breath and realized, belatedly, that he’d stopped.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m…”
“You don’t want this.” It wasn’t a question. His voice, rich and dark before, was flat now, defeated.
“I…” How to respond to that? How on earth did you tell a man that yes you wanted him, but he was too much for you? How did you let him know that his intensity, his beauty, the smell of his skin, all made you hungry for something you’d given up on entirely? Something you probably didn’t deserve.
How could you say that to the tattooed criminal you’d straddled on an exam table? Not exactly first-kiss banter, was it?
She looked up to find him eyeing her, to feel a rough thumb swipe away a tear she hadn’t been conscious of crying.
“You want to tell me?”
“No,” she answered.
He nodded.
“You want me to go?”
This time she shook her head, and he tightened his arm around her back, slid his hand up from her bottom to her shoulder blade. He could probably have spanned both with one of his enormous palms.
“I scare you.”
