He purses his lips slightly to kiss my fingertips. The fire inside me now flares to an inferno.
“I’m going to count to the five, and when I get to five, I’m going to kiss you.”
“Jackson,” I sigh, still touching his face. The sound of me saying his first name has his breath shuddering.
“And I promise you, it won’t be a maybe kiss,” he whispers down to me, a sexy-as-sin smile touching that delectable mouth that is scant inches from mine.
My legs open of their own accord, needing him to fill the emptiness and ache in my center. JD settles his narrow hips between my outstretched thighs and the feeling is electric. He’s barely touched me, he hasn’t even kissed me, yet I feel himeverywhere. I have never wanted a kiss so badly in my life.
“Five.” He lowers himself down until our noses touch, his arm muscles contracting and thickening as he holds most of his weight off me. JD’s so close now that I can smell him. Something subtle and light and very mouth-watering.
“Four.” His callused hands, roughened by the leather of the football, caress across my temples and reach around my neck so he can fan out the hair that’s stuck under my shoulders.
“I love your hair,” he tells me as he plays with a few strands, sifting some between his fingers. Those oceanic eyes, a mixture of turbulent waves and rolling swells, come back to mine. If his eyes are the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, then mine are the Alice blue of sea ice.
“Three,” he continues.
My hands run along the breadth of his shoulders, so wide and strong from years of football, then down his arms that are solid and thick, and back up again. I twine them around the back of his neck, his soft brown hair silky and soft.
“Two,” he says, shifting his face slightly to the side so he can press a kiss to my bruised cheek, his day’s-worth of stubble rasping goose bumps across my skin. My toes curl, as my knees tighten their grip on his muscular thighs.
“That kiss doesn’t count,” he informs me, his voice low and husky.
But it does, I want to tell him. That one small dusting of his lips across my cheek destroyed me, and I know I will never come back from this. From him. That one tiny kiss just razed to the ground the stone wall I had erected around my heart. JD bulldozed his way through, and I stood by and watched helplessly as the figurative wall tumbled down like a deck of cards.
“One,” I say, and pull him to me, needing,craving, desperate for his lips on mine.
JD’s lips are so incredibly soft. I feel as if I’m melting into his kiss. Our kiss. Our first kiss. Floating and falling at the same time, like a feather at the whim of the wind. I open for him, and his tongue touches mine on a moan. From him, from me, maybe from both of us. He devastates me with softness, taking his time, delving deep, tangling his tongue with mine, then gently sucking and pulling. Each stroke has my core clenching in response until I’m writhing underneath him, hands pulling at his shirt, wanting to feel him and map his skin with my fingertips—his shoulders, his obliques, his backside, the hard ridges of his abdominals.
JD kisses me deeply, sinking into me one last time, before he pulls back to kiss my nose, each eyelid, and my chin. As he levitates above me, using the strength of his arms, his blue eyes filled with lust and desire, I brush my knuckles back and forth across his face. My tender strokes have his eyelids lowering and his face tilting into my touch.
“I don’t think I’ve felt anything as wonderful as the way you kiss, JD,” I profess, profoundly entranced by him and his effect on me. After that kiss, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call him my maybe friend again.
JD’s gaze roams over my face like he’s etching every detail into memory. “Sunshine, I have wanted to do that for averylong fucking time. It was so worth the wait.”
He smiles such a beatific smile at me. Like kissing me is his happiness. When I look back on this moment—days, weeks, months, and years from now—I’ll be able to say with absolute certitude that it was our first kiss that tore down my walls and had me falling for Jackson Dillon Hallstead.
JD loops one arm around my waist and lifts us both off the bed until we’re standing, our fronts flushed together like we’re slow dancing. When music starts to play from the speakers mounted into the ceiling and walls, I laugh when I see JD holding the remote.
“That thing is awesome. It’s like MIT, NASA, and Bill Gates put their collective thinking caps on and came up with that remote. I bet it can solve world peace, make dinner, and clone small children.”
“This is a pretty spectacular room,” JD comments, throwing the remote on the bed and looking around. “I think I’ve been pretty chill about everything by not asking questions even though I’m dying to, but Aurora…what the hell is going on? We’re standing in a house that costs as much as a small country, and Fallon Montgomery, of all people, just handed you a piece of paper that says he’s your brother.”
“Half-brother,” I amend, and JD covers my mouth with his hand.
“We’re going to need to work on your vocabulary. From now on, you aren’t allowed to say ‘half’ or ‘maybe’ ever again.”
I pout against the palm of his hand, which he erases with a rub of his thumb as he pulls my bottom lip down. I don’t know why I nip the pad of his thumb with my teeth, but its effects are apparent in the way his pupils expand.
Needing space between us before I throw caution to the wind and do something reckless, I step out of his embrace and explore the bedroom. It’s as big as my apartment. As I look around, I try my best to explain things to him.
“Trevor came to see me Monday morning. Short version is Phillip Montgomery died last Christmas along with his wife in a plane crash.”
“I saw that in the news.”
“Phillip Montgomery also had numerous affairs that resulted in the procreation of at least five illegitimate children. Well, six if you count Trevor. I’m one of the six apparently. Trevor and Fallon found some books stashed in a hidden safe that had records of all of Phillip’s ‘love children,’” I say using finger quotes. “That’s how Trevor found me.”
I open a pair of French doors and am pleased to find an attached balcony which I promptly walk out onto.
