“The one you moved out here with?”
“Yeah. I got a fancy hotel room, champagne, rose petals, the whole thing.”
“And you came in two seconds?” Merritt filled in.
“Pretty much. She was nice about it, though. The second time went a lot better.” He paused. “How did we get to talking about me having sex with someone else again?”
“You were promising that you could sleep in my bed without ravishing me.”
“Oh yeah.” He slid his hands from her hips back under her shirt, over the smooth skin of her torso, both of their breaths hitching at the same time, her ribs expanding beneath his palms as they brushed the undersides of her breasts. “Slow,” he murmured into her neck, inhaling deeply, feeling like he was hypnotized, and he skated his hands back down to grip her waist in a last grasp at restraint.
She let out a shaky breath.
“On the other hand, this might be an internationally recognized form of torture.” She turned her face toward his, catching his lips in a long, lazy kiss. “Do you want to move?”
“Where? Your room?”
“It would probably be more comfortable. The power’s out, the fire’s mostly out, there’s not much reason to stay here.”
They both got to their feet, a little clumsily, Niko shaking off the head rush as he tried to adjust himself as discreetly as possible. They each grabbed a candle before she led him down the hall.
“Watch your step,” she warned, a moment before Niko caught himself from tripping over a pair of shoes in the doorway. “Sorry, it’s always a disaster. I have some stuff in storage, but it still feels like I have a whole house’s worth of junk in here.”
Carefully, they navigated around the room, placing a candle on her nightstand and another on her desk, casting the room in a soft, flickering glow.
He watched her, his heart hammering, as she shrugged off her cardigan and draped it over her desk chair, leaving her in just a tank top and leggings. She made her way toward the bed—unmade, rumpled duvet—and crawled onto it.
He’d seen glimpses of her tattoos before, though not often,since Crested Peak was a long-sleeves-long-pants climate most of the year. She had more than he’d thought—at least six or seven on her arms, another curving below her collarbone, and the intriguing hint of something in the gap between her tank top and leggings.
In the low light, they just looked like black blobs. He wanted to get close enough to make out each line and curve, discover every last one still hidden by her clothing, run his fingers over them, his tongue—and now he could, he realized, his mouth going dry.
“Do you want me to, um. Get undressed?” He suddenly felt like that nervous teenage virgin all over again.
“Unless you’re planning on sleeping in your jeans.”
He glanced down, slowly undoing his belt, then his fly, before dropping his jeans to the floor. He thought about leaving his shirt on, but then he remembered the way he’d caught her staring that night at Off the Rails, and he pulled it off, too.
He made his way over to the bed, where Merritt was sitting close to the edge, her legs tucked under her, watching him. When he stopped in front of her, she rose onto her knees, skating her hands up his chest, through his thick forest of chest hair, sending tingles through his whole body.
“I love this,” she murmured.
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s really sexy.” She leaned forward to brush a kiss between his pecs. “Please tell me I’m not the first person to say that.”
“You’re not, but it’s controversial.”
He was surprised he was able to pull out a word with that many syllables, now that she was using her nails to lightly scrape up and down his torso, driving him half out of his mind.
“When you took your shirt off in the kitchen,” she said, “this was all I wanted to do.”
“You could have.”
“That might’ve been a little hard to explain to Dev.”
He laughed in the back of his throat, then eased one knee onto the bed. She pushed herself back to make room for him, leaning onto her elbows as he half crawled over her. She yanked her duvet out from where it was stuck under their limbs and drew it over both their heads as she guided him down onto the mattress next to her.
They settled there under the cocoon of the blanket, legs intertwined, faces a breath away, hands roaming gently. It genuinely felt like they might be the only two people on the planet.
