“Oh,” he said, his voice an echo to his own ears, because now he noticed that sometime between her saying his name, her putting her hands at his waist, his own had moved. Over the summit of those shoulder curves, his palms on the faint incline of her trapezius. His thumbs on her collarbone, one upward stroke away from her pale, perfect neck, smooth and unadorned.
Do not, he told himself, trying to reconnect the right wires: the ones that told him he could not touch her like this, he could notfeela thing for her like this, not after so many years of hardly feeling anything other than hurt.
It was notforhim, to feel this way.
But then, Layla Bailey pulled him closer.
Like she needed to tell him something important.
“It made me think of you.”
Chapter Seventeen
His mouth on hers might as well have been a brand.
A hard press at first—not really a kiss at all by any standard definition.
But as soon as she felt it…as soon as she held the whole lightning bolt of Griffin Testa between her hands, she knew that she did not—right now or maybe ever again—want standard.
She wantedthis.
Him.
His thick hair under the light of an Edison bulb, his gaze moving over her whole face when she talked, his held-back sounds of satisfaction as he ate.
His bringing her here, to this street and this secret doorway, his body blocking hers from view.
His coal-black eyelashes and how they hung low over his eyes when he was looking down at her, looming over her, to say something as electric asThere shouldn’t be anything amicable about losing you.
And now, this—his impulse, his leaning-in haste, his hands oneither side of her neck, holding her with the lightest, most contradictory touch.
Hismouth.
Moving now that the mark on her had been made: a tilt of his head and a tug of her top lip between his, and then it was as though the kiss broke open for them both, became something else. It wasn’t just a bolt of lightning anymore—it was a huge, rolling thunderstorm, the kind that overwhelmed every single one of your senses.
Kissing himconsumedher.
Her tongue slipped into his mouth first, a desperate initiation she couldn’t hold back after his relentless exploration of her lips—a kiss at each corner, gentle suction on the bottom curve, a return to that spot on the top, with a scrape of his teeth this time, like he was testing the texture. She thought,Me, too, me, too; I want to feel everything, too, and when she tasted him with the tip of her tongue, the dark, chocolate-soufflé perfection of him, he held her tighter, his fingertips pressing through her hair and against the back of her neck, bringing her into him as he groaned in pleasure, letting her feel the low vibration of it against her mouth.
Letting her feel iteverywhere.
It would be a lie to say that she thought only of him, because at first—at first, she thought of other kisses, too. The one in the restaurant that started all this. Then, Jamie—of course, Jamie, because Griffin had asked, hadforcedher to think about Jamie. The maybe half dozen men she’d kissed since Jamie, too—matches on an app, all of them, in different cities she’d not really lived in for work.
She thought of them like this:What was that called, what I saw those people in the restaurant do, what I did myself with Jamie andthose other guys whose names I can’t remember? What was the word for that?
Because it wasn’t this.
It wasn’t anything like this.
It was such a huge, disorienting feeling of having the whole word—the wholeworld—remade, that for a split second while he cupped her face and changed the angle again, she took advantage and started to ask.
“Have you ever—”
But all he said was “No,” and then hebither—right on the sharpest angle of her jaw, the most erotic correction, before kissing her ear, her cheek, her lips again.
After that, she figured it didn’t matter what she was going to ask.
She figured his answer would beNono matter what.
