Overall, the effect was very masculine and veryLane.
Finally, I faced him again.
I expected to be nervous about broaching this subject. There was no denying Lane’s alpha male status in the world. He’d never been very good at giving up control. Hell, he held thehighest law enforcement position in this entire county, a title he’d earned through hard work and his ability to lead his men. The fact that he’d so easily agreed to giving this a try with me took my breath away.
Returning to him, I stopped right in front of him. For a moment, we merely stared at each other. Then, with surprisingly steady hands, I reached for the hem of his sweater and shoved it up to his pecs. Lane got the idea and pulled it the rest of the way off while I let my fingertips trail over his warm skin, moving south until I connected with his belt.
“May I?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied, voice a low rumble that I felt from the roots of my hair to the tips of my toes.
Once unbuckled, I slid it free from the loops on his pants and went for his fly, unbuttoning it and dragging down the zipper. His cock was already a steel rod pressed against it, and he hissed when the backs of my fingers brushed it through his underwear.
I was pretty sure even that had gotten bigger since we were younger. Was that even possible?
His pants pooled at his ankles, and he stepped out of them, leaving him clad only in black boxer briefs.
Gesturing at him, I said, “Those gotta go too, Chief.”
Lane grinned as he hooked his fingers in the waistband and tugged the underwear down. The sound of the fabric rasping against the hair on his tree trunk thighs was fuckingobscene. Combined with the sight of his cock popping free? Heat pooled in my core.
My palms tingled with the desire to touch him, and I licked my lips, thinking about all the perfect places on his body I wanted to put my mouth.
Snagging the handcuffs from the nightstand, I swung them around on my finger and jerked my chin at the bed.
“Go on,” I urged him.
He complied easily, crawling on and settling on his back in the center on the large mattress, head resting on a pillow, arms up over his head, waiting for me. Climbing on after him, I straddled his torso and hooked one of the cuffs on him, looped the chain through the metal posts of the headboard, and clicked the other around his other wrist.
“That okay?” I asked. “Not too tight or anything?”
Lane tugged on them and rotated his wrists a bit. “They’re good.”
“Good,” I grinned.
For a moment, I simply stared at him, going so far as to trace the tip of my pointer finger over the lines of his face: his eyebrows, the slope of his nose, those high cheekbones and full mouth. Deciding I’d start there, I bent to kiss him—gently. I couldn’t afford to get carried away. Not yet.
I slid backward, and Lane opened his legs so I could maneuver to sit between them.
As I’d done with his face, I let my fingertips drift over his skin, over all of the ink now decorating what had largely been a blank canvas the last time I’d seen him naked. Tracing the shapes and lines of text across his collarbones, down his pecs and into the valleys of his abdomen.
I sucked in a sharp breath when my gaze snagged on a word near his left hip, where his obliques cut into that delicious V that would normally force my eyes right to his dick.
But not now.
I brushed my thumb over the five cursive letters.
Sunny.
My nickname.
The nickname he’d given me even before we were anything, when we were just two kids living in this town, going to the same school, the same parties, running with the same crowd but not quite in the same circle.
“Because you’re like fucking sunshine,”he’d said the first time he used it.
I hadn’t felt like sunshine in a long time, but maybe, with his help, I could find my way back there.
“How long have you had this?”
