“Hell yeah,” he grunts. “Took that shirt and used it to jerk off until I couldn’t smell you on it anymore.”
The brash admission has my thighs clenching, more slick drenching my panties. My scent intensifies, and he chuckles.
“You like that? You enjoy knowing you’ve made me so fucking hard I can’t think straight with nothing more than your perfume and your lips against mine?” He grabs my knee, forcing my legs even wider, pushing more insistently against my core. “I just about killed my brother for pulling you away from me that night.”
“It’s probably good he did,” I admit on a sigh.
I’m too romantic to want my first time to be in a dimly-lit private room of a club, no matter what my body was clamoring for in the moment.
He stills against me, his body coiling with a possessive rage reflected in the sharp edge to his scent.
“Why?”
The word is no more than a snarl. He pulls the skin on my shoulder between his teeth, hard enough to bruise. I suck in a breath through my teeth, twisting a hand into his shirt. He’s going to withdraw the moment I tell him, the moment I admit I’ve never been touched like this, haven’t done anything more than a make-out session, and that was four years ago now. My knees tighten around his waist, preparing for him to try and pull away, needing him plastered against me.
“You… you should know that I’ve never done this,” I whisper.
He stills, presses his palm flat to the small of my back. His fingers dig into my thigh just above my knee. “Done what? Gotten eaten out in your shop?”
I shake my head.
“Not just in my shop.” I breathe in the lemongrass scent and let my eyes close. Admitting this at twenty-two, especially as an Omega, is almost mortifying. “I’ve never been with anyone like that. I’m… I’m a virgin.”
An alarm goes off on his phone, cutting through the sudden silence before he can even react. He silences it without pulling it from his pocket, his grip unflinching on my leg. He slowly pulls away from my shoulder, kissing the bruised bit of skin. When he finally looks at me, my body clenches all over again. There’s nothing but primal hunger in his gaze, in his slightly swollen lips and hard jaw.
“All right,” he says.
He kisses me again, this one more leashed, more restrained than before. I melt into him anyway, and he smiles even as he slowly extricates himself.
“I have to get to the rink,” he says. “Physio needs to look at my knee before warm-ups.”
“From that blocked shot on Saturday?”
He nods and shrugs. “It’ll be fine. They just get nervous any time it’s a knee.”
He presses a soft kiss to my lips. Those butterflies are in my stomach again, making it impossible to say anything as he pulls away. He seems to understand, though. He laces his fingers with mine without ever looking away.
“We don’t have a game Wednesday. I want to take you out.”
A thousand responses rise to the tip of my tongue, but I force them back. “What should I wear? How formal?”
“A cocktail dress,” he says. “I’ll pick you up at six.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You know where I live?”
“I’ll ask Billie,” he says, smirking.
He kisses me again before pulling away entirely. I whine at the loss of his heat. He runs his thumb over my cheek. Another alarm rings from his phone, and he sighs. He doesn’t say a word before walking back out the front of the shop. I tilt my head back, staring at the white ceiling of my work room. After only a couple minutes, both our scents are completely gone, dispersed by the purifier.
Acting on instinct, I strip out of my apron and shirt, pulling the back-up I always keep at the shop and shoving the original into a plastic bag to bring home, desperate to keep his lemongrass scent until Wednesday.
Wednesday, when I’m going on a date.
With Rhett James.
Chapter Ten
RHETT
