We both know it.
More silence as he takes my hand again and leads me up the front steps. Through the door.
And then he’s kissing me again, backing me up until I’m pressed up against the wall. His hands slide from my face intomy hair and tighten there, tilting my head back, and he kisses me deeper, the scruff of his jaw rasping against my skin.
He kisses me like he's making a point. Like he's making up for every night he paced the floor and every time he found an exit and every careful, cowardly inch of distance he built between us.
And I kiss him back with everything I have. All the weeks of patience and wanting and frustration, all of it, straight from my lips to his.
He kisses me all the way down the hall. He’s heedless of anything else, not the table he bumps his hip on the way there, not the light switch he’s groping for on the wall, too busy with his mouth of mine to want to break for a second.
Finally he manages to flip the switch and low, warm light illuminates the room. I'm grateful for it. I don't want to do this in the dark. I want to see his face.
I want to remember every second of this experience in full color.
His bedroom is the one room in this house I've never been in. I've stood in the doorway once or twice, glimpsed the king-size wood bed, the window that faces the mountains. It looks like him in here. Spare and considered. Nothing unnecessary.
He cups my face with his hands and just looks at me.
For once, we don’t talk.
His hands find the lacing holding my dress together. Slowly, achingly slowly, he loosens the laces, like he’s unwrapping a present he’s afraid of breaking. He gives it his full concentration, glancing up at me every so often the whole time. Giving me every opportunity to stop him.
I don’t.
He slides the laces apart, careful, and the dress falls.
I watch him forget to breathe.
Since I threw out those panties, there’s nothing underneath. I’m standing before him completely naked.
No sense in being shy, after all. He saw just about everything from the first second he laid eyes on me.
I watch him look at me and I feel, surprisingly, not at all self-conscious. Not at all shy.
I feel something closer to… powerful.
Because Walker Rhodes, who’s had his pick of women his whole life, who’s stood on stages in front of tens of thousands of people, is looking at me in the lamplight of his bedroom like I've knocked the breath clean out of him.
“Sadie,” he says. “My God.”
He rubs his cock through his jeans, just looking at me. His gaze lingers on my breasts. My pussy. My eyes.
“That first day,” he murmurs, “when I saw you in that soaking wet underwear… I pictured you like this so many times. In my bedroom, naked and ready for me.”
He reaches out and touches my face first. Then my collarbone. Then traces a slow line down my chest to squeeze my breasts. I shiver despite the warmth of the room.
He seems to savor touching me. Caressing me everywhere. It’s like he made a decision somewhere between the kiss against his truck and coming back home to take his time with me, to refuse to be hurried.
But I’m getting impatient. I’ve waited a very long time to get naked with a man. Especially since meetingthisman, who’s made those few weeks of waiting seem longer than all the years that came before it.
I reach up and start on his shirt buttons.
My hands are almost steady. Almost.
He looks down at my hands working and then back up at my face. The tenderness is still there but underneath it something is smoldering. Something is catching fire.
When I finish with the buttons, he shrugs the shirt off his shoulders. I spread my palms flat against his chest, his skin warm over the solid muscle underneath. His heart is beating fast beneath my palms.
