Continue touching me in neglected places? “If you don’t, I’ll become very cross with you.”
He chuffs a laugh before he kisses me. His lips taste like wine, and his tongue slips into my mouth, making me dizzier. I curl myleg around his, trying to grind against anything I can. I need his friction.
The next thing I know, his hand slides between my thighs and up my dress. “Let me touch you.”
I nod and lean back against the rough brick wall behind me. His touch is feathery at first. Unhurried. But then he leans one hand on the wall and stares into my eyes as his fingertips slip around my lacy underwear and finally, there.
My whole world shrinks to his fingertips and their electric touch.
I make unholy sounds as he draw circles around my clit. I’d be worried, but I’ve been wet since before we left the restaurant, and I was cleared by my doctor two weeks ago for anything I might want to do with Ronan. The advice was to go slow.
We’ve been going slow for two months. I’m going so slow that I’m losing my mind.
Not now, though. Just as Ronan’s fingers dip into me, he presses against me with another searing kiss. He touches me just right—his palm on my clit, pressing, his fingers finding the other good spot, the one inside. I grip his shoulders for balance, or I’ll fall. He knows it too—his sounds have gone from not much to this low growl I feel in my marrow.
I palm him over his trousers, and he flexes against me, grinding into my hand. Makes my core clench around his fingers. If I wasn’t terrified of getting caught, I’d insist on more right here in this alleyway. I want to make him come. Want to taste him. Feel him.
But our kids can’t have both of their parents get arrested in the same night, so I hold back. It’s the only thing I hold back.
“Close,” I hiss in his mouth.
“Come for me, love.”
The orgasm that follows steals my breath, and I nearly fall. I’ve tried in the shower, hoping to figure out my new anatomy on my own before taking it for a test drive. But I couldn’t do it. I got close and chickened out. I wasn’t sure if it would hurt.
It doesn’t hurt. I’m too floaty to think straight.
Oh, right. I was touching him.
Just as I start to go to my knees for him, he keeps me on my feet. “Not here. Let’s go to mine.”
I nod and let him lead me out of the alley.
26
RONAN
She tastes exactlythe way I remember.
That is the first coherent thought I have upon licking my finger as we exit the alleyway. Over eleven months of remembering, and I was right about every detail, which is not always the case with memories I have examined too closely.
“I’m not sure I’ll make it the whole walk if you don’t do that to me again.”
“Two blocks,” I confirm, smiling at her eagerness. “You can survive two blocks.”
We make it one before she pulls me into a doorway and kisses me again, and I let her, because I’ve been waiting over eleven months, and two blocks is a perfectly manageable distance to cover in stages.
She laughs against my mouth when I walk her backward into the door, low and delighted, and I file that sound away with the same thoroughness I have been filing everything about her since the plane. The cold doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m not sure I am registering the cold at all.
We stand there in the doorway for longer than is strictly efficient. I find I have no objection to this. We make it to my building eventually, with more groping than is suitable for polite society.
The older I get, the less I care for polite society.
My penthouse is a significant departure from the warm, cluttered cottage she has been living in for the past two months. It’s large and clean and precisely ordered, the home of a man who has been alone in it for a long time and has organized it accordingly. I watch her take it in. The floor-to-ceiling windows with the city below, the bookshelves that run the length of one wall, the kitchen that is significantly better equipped than hers, which is to say it contains things other than eggs and butter and a subscription to a meal kit service she never opens.
“It’s very you,” she says.
“Is that good or bad?”
