“Kiss me, Jeremy.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “I trust you.”
Three words that crack open a fault line in my chest that runs deeper than I knew I had in me. She let down her walls even though every other man in her life showed her that trust was a trap. She survived and flourished by dismantling the belief that she deserved to be cherished. And now she’s choosing to trust me.
I flip her onto her back and she lets out a breathless laugh that turns into a gasp when I push back inside her. I brace myself on one arm, cup her face with the other hand, and I kiss her the way I’ve wanted to since the first night, feasting on her while I move inside her. She wraps her legs around me and fists her hands in my hair. Our kiss becomes the center of everything. Every thrust, every breath, and those beautiful, needy sounds she makes against my lips.
I drag my tongue over her jaw and kiss the corner of her mouth. Then I come back to her lips. Because I can’t stop. I’m already an addict.
She arches into me and I adjust the angle and rhythm of my thrusts. And when she moans into my mouth, I feel it in every nerve ending.
“Please.” She gasps out the plea, and then her tongue is sliding against mine, and I’m lost.
The orgasm builds at the base of my spine, and I try to hold it back because I don’t want this to end. Can I even exist in a world where her mouth isn’t on mine, her body not wrapped around me?
She comes again, a shudder that rolls through her whole body, and I follow her over the edge with my mouth still pressed to hers,swallowing the sounds we make together, my hand still cradling her face.
We lie there afterward, with me still half hard inside her. Her fingers trace patterns on my shoulder blade, and neither of us speaks because some moments don’t need words. I press my lips to her temple and then the bridge of her nose before I return to her mouth, giving her every opportunity to revoke my privileges. It would fucking kill me at this point, but I’d never take that choice from her.
“The no kissing rule was there for a reason,” she murmurs.
“Yes, it was.”
Her eyes in the half-dark shine with an emotion that makes my heart scramble for purchase. Then she offers me a smile that rivals every sunrise that ever was. “Fuck the rules,” she whispers.
I grin right back and then kiss her again. Because I can. Knowing like I know my own name that I’ll never want to stop.
25
AVAH
I wakeup tangled with Jeremy Winslow, which is becoming a habit that I’m not sure I ever want to give up.
His breath is soft on the back of my neck, the morning air cool beyond the heated cocoon of our bodies wrapped in the bed’s patchwork quilt. Pale light filters in through the thin curtain. It’s early, but not obscenely predawn early.
It would be easy enough to slide out from under his arm without waking him, but I stay put. I’m not ready to relinquish the warmth of his chest against my back. Or his hand curled loosely around my hip like he’s holding on even in sleep. My body fits against his like we were meant to be, and I try to memorize the feel of this moment before the day carries it away.
How am I going to explain to my friends that I discovered joy in a shabby cabin with a sagging mattress and a pull-chain lamp, all wrapped up in a man who volunteered to fight a bear for me like it was as easy as picking up takeout?
I’ve been thinking of my bucket list challenge like a scavenger hunt—tick items off a list and prove that I’m capable of happiness. But lying here with Jeremy’s arms around me, it’s clear that joyisn’t something you go looking for. It’s a feeling you slow down long enough to recognize when it finds you.
Jeremy stirs and tightens his arm around me as his lips press against my shoulder.
“Morning,” he mumbles, his voice rough with sleep.
“Morning.”
We lie here for another few minutes before the tinny blast of a bugle recording crackles through the camp’s speaker system. Mariel and Joel apparently believe in the full summer camp experience.
Jeremy groans into my hair. “Can we skip breakfast?”
His cock is hard against the curve of my ass, and I’m sorely tempted. But I’m also competitive AF.
“We need fuel to win this thing, buddy. We’ll have time for that later.”
“I only need thirty seconds,” he mutters, even though we both know that’s not true.
I laugh and drag myself upright, already looking forward to proving him wrong later tonight.
The lodge dining hall is packed with campers and volunteers crammed around long wooden tables, passing platters of scrambled eggs, fruit, and bacon that’s been cooked to almost crumbling.
