Just run away, Ti!
That’s exactly what I try to do. I try running away—trybeing the operative word—because the moment I turn, he’s also on the move, and I don’t even get to take a half-step.
He captures me in a flash, whirling me around, and when I open my mouth to cry out, it’s like he’s reading my mind, knowing my every move before I make it, and no sound comes out.
How can it?
When he’s already kissed me into silence.
No. No. No.
But it’s too late.
The moment his mouth possesses mine, it’s all over.
My whole body surrenders before my brain even gets a vote, and I’m kissing him back, my hands clutching the front of his shirt the way they did on the jet, because my hands, it turns out, are traitors.
His kiss deepens, and a whimper slips out of me that I will be dying of humiliation about later, but later is a version of me that doesn’t exist yet, and the version of me that does exist right now has her arms around his neck, and her back against the wall, and she’s tilting her head up the way his hand beneath her jaw is asking her to.
Oh.
Oh.
He takes his time.
That’s what kills me. He’s not rushing. He’s not fumbling. He’s kissing me the way a man kisses a woman when he’s already decided he’s going to get every single inch of her eventually, and tonight is just the first installment.
And somewhere in the middle of that slow, patient possession, my traitor hands remember they have more they want to do.
My fingers slide up from the front of his shirt. Past the open collar. Up along the line of his throat where I can feel his pulse, strong and steady, nothing like mine, which is currently doing something that would get a cardiologist’s attention. My hands keep going. Into his hair.
It’s as soft as it looked.
I don’t know what I expected. Something coarser, maybe, to match the rest of him. But his hair is fine and thick and when my fingers tangle in it, he makes a sound against my mouth.
A small sound. Barely a sound.
But it’shis.
And I did it.
Idid it, me, with my traitor hands that apparently know what they’re doing even though the rest of me is nineteen years old and terrified.
I do it again.
I pull him closer, both hands in his hair now, and I feel the exact moment his restraint—whatever restraint had been keeping him patient, keeping him gentle, keeping him the man who took his time at the jet this afternoon—breaks.
Because the next thing I know, his kiss isn’t patient anymore.
The next thing I know, his hand is no longer at my jaw. It’s moved. Slid lower. Settled at my waist, at my hip, at the small of my back, pulling me flush against him, and I can feel all of him now, every hard line of him, and the space between us has ceased to exist.
A growl rumbles low in his throat.
"Tiara."
And then his mouth is on my neck.
Oh.
