"I know. I want it back. Temporarily."
I laugh as he sits me up and works the buttons with more patience than I've ever had. Then the flannel is gone and the cold hits my skin for half a second before he comes along to smother away the chill. He lays me back down and just looks at me in the red glow from the stove grate.
"Say something," I whisper.
"I'm not going to sleep with you tonight."
I cringe. "That is the worst thing you could have possibly said."
"I mean it. The rule stands. Not until you know everything."
"Afon—"
"But." His hand moves down my stomach and hooks into the waistband of my leggings. "There's a lot of territory between here and there."
"Oh," I say. Very intelligently.
"Is that a yes?"
"That is a yes. That's a notarized yes. That's a yes in triplicate, filed with the county clerk?—"
"Caroline. Be serious."
"Yes. Please. Yes."
He drags the leggings down my legs and off. His hands go to my knees, then coax them apart, and then I stop being able to narrate my own life.
He starts with his mouth at the inside of my ankle, the bad one. He presses a tender kiss to the bone there, careful, like an apology to the joint itself, and then he works his way up. Calf. Knee. The soft skin of my inner thigh, where his beard drags and makes me jump.
"Cold?" he asks.
"No. Very much no. The opposite of cold."
He hums against my thigh—and then he proceeds to take the scenic route.
I do meanscenic. The man explores every inch of my inner thigh with his mouth—a slow drag of lips here, a graze of teeth there, the beard a constant, rasping tagalong—and each time he gets close enough that my hips lift on their own to get what Ireallywant, he detours.
Back down toward my knee.
Lower.
Away.
Over to the other thigh, where he starts the entire pilgrimage again from scratch.
"You're doing this on purpose," I gasp.
"I always do."
"This is a war crime. The Hague is going to hear about this."
His breath ghosts over exactly the place I want him and then… nothing. A kiss pressed to my hip bone instead. I emit a squeak. "Afon.Please.I don't think I can take much?—"
His mouth lands on me, and the sentence dies.
I have been kissed there before. I want to state that for the record. I'm twenty-eight years old, I went to college, I have had boyfriends, some of them even half-decent in bed. But there is a difference between a man who does this because he read somewhere that he should, and a man who does this because he has decided it is the only thing in the world worth doing.
Afon is the second man.
