My face flamed at his insinuation, but I kept my mouth shut. Didn’t matter. He smoothed his thumbs over my hot cheeks and toned his smile down to gentle.
“Truth time, Taryn. I’ve been lusting after you for all my adult life. I wanted our first real kiss to be special, memorable.” A rueful expression crossed his features. “Yesterday’s fuckup was memorable but definitely not special. That moment of selfishness at Christmas a couple of years ago doesn’t count either.”
I sucked in a breath. “That happened?”
Confusion furrowed his brow. “Me kissing you goodbye before I headed off to Germany? Yeah.” Confusion turned to hurt. “You forgot about it?”
With a shake of my head, I said, “I thought I dreamed it. Ever since that night, I’ve dreamed of that kiss, but you never said anything afterward. You acted exactly the same, as though it never happened, so I thought I’d made it up.”
Beneath my seat on his lap, I sensed him relax.
“Like I said. I had no business asking you to wait for me, so kissing you was a dick move. But you looked so beautiful in the falling snow that I couldn’t help myself.” He ran the pad of his finger over my lips. “Then I couldn’t stop thinking about how perfectly your mouth fit mine, as if you’d been made especially for me.” His expression darkened. “I lost my head that night and again yesterday afternoon. The one thing I wanted was to make our first kiss perfect because it would be both of our last first kisses.”
It was my turn to knit my brow. “But our first kiss was perfect. That’s probably why I thought it was a dream. Well, that and I couldn’t believe you were kissing me,” I added with a wry grin.
“That’s where the problem is. You didn’t see it coming. Hell, I didn’t see it coming.” He tensed. “Plus, it was my last first kiss, but it wasn’t yours.” His mouth turned down again. “You ended up dating the douchebag, so he was your last first kiss.”
My gaze followed my fingers as I rubbed away his frown lines. Closing my eyes, I pulled in a deep breath as I gathered myself. Then I cupped his face in my hands and stared deep into his silvery gaze. Taking the biggest chance of my life, I exposed myself to him.
“My experience, including you, is limited to three guys. The other two didn’t make me lose control.”
For a long minute we merely held each other’s eyes. Then he wrapped me in his arms and buried his face in my neck. I had no idea how long we stayed that way, each breathing the other in, but at last my thighs started to tremble.
“Danny.”
“I know, T.” Lifting his head, his expression more earnest than I’d ever seen it, he said, “I don’t fucking deserve you, but now that you’re mine, I’m never giving you up.”
Still holding me, he lay back on the mattress and rolled us onto our sides, where we stretched out facing each other. In silence we studied each other, cataloging features, sharing tiny intimate smiles, just being. Over the course of our friendship, we’d often left silences we didn’t need to fill. Somehow, this one felt more natural, easy.
Loud voices filling the foyer interrupted our moment. My brow went up. Danny sighed.
“Guess I’d better take you back to campus.”
Yet instead of rolling off the bed, he tangled his fingers in my hair and tugged me close. “You’ll always be my best friend, T.”
When he covered my mouth with his, he imprinted the promise of his words, and I heard what he didn’t say. It may have been a long time coming, but we were building this new stage of our relationship on something already firmly established. Something that would last.
?Chapter Twenty
?Danny
Icould have spentthe rest of the day—hell, the rest of the week—lying on my bed staring into the endless blue of Taryn’s eyes. Being allowed to touch her, hold her, kiss her? All my dreams were right beside me.
Kissing her when she was all in, when I hadn’t surprised her and freaked her out, was a revelation. She’d only kissed two other guys? Unbelievable. Her response to me had absolutely blown the top of my head off. Hottest. Fucking. Kiss. Of. My. Life.
It had been more than five years since I’d had sex with another person. I’d come perilously close to embarrassing myself when she’d dry-humped me while we were ravaging each other’s mouths. I’d probably have blue balls for a week, but I’d worry about that later. I’d meant it when I said I wanted it real private the first time we made love. That racket going on downstairs had only reinforced my good decision to wait to love her in her quiet little shoebox of an apartment. With it being located on the second level of the building, right on the end, she could moan as loud as she wanted to when I pleasured her, and no one would be the wiser about what we were up to.
Unlike my place. Knowing my girl and my roommates the way I did, I couldn’t set her up to put up with their bullshit if they happened to storm into the house in time to hear us getting busy. Neither one of us needed that. The noise echoing up the stairs only proved my point.
Introducing her to them was going to be torture enough—especially with Bax and Finn who as far as I could tell mostly liked to entertain jersey chasers, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to put a run on my girl. Callahan had something going with his cute, curly-haired study partner, so I wasn’t too worried about him.
“Time to go, T,” I said as I reluctantly disentangled myself from her and sat up.
When she joined me on the edge of my bed, she pulled her phone from her pocket to check the time. “Wow, how did that happen?”
I smirked. “What? Time?”
“I have class in fifteen minutes. I was going to look over my notes since I have a quiz.”
