Page 16 of My Girl to Take

She kisses like someone who has nothing to compare it to. There’s no technique in it at all—it’s just want, undiluted, and it’s the most dangerous thing that’s happened to me in a decade.

I get a hand in her hair and tilt her head back. She comes up on her toes, both hands fisted in the front of my shirt. I walk her backward until the couch catches the back of her knees. She goes down, and I go with her.

Her hands come up to my collar and start tugging.

“Slow,” I tell her. I take both her wrists in one hand and hold them at her side.

Her eyes open. “Why—”

“Because I said.” I let go, one finger at a time, and watch her decide whether to move them. She doesn’t. “Leave them there.”

She leaves them there. And something in her face changes when she does. I file it to examine later.

I take my time. Blouse, a button at a time, my mouth at her throat and under her jaw and along her collarbone. She arches up every single time, making a sound I’ll be hearing for the rest of my life.

She’s astonishing, and that’s the problem. Every response feeds my desire.

“Logan?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t… I don’t know what to—”

“You don’t have to do anything.” I get the last button. “Keep your hands where they are.”

She does, still trembling, and I keep going.

I get her trousers open, my hand sliding to where I’ve been thinking about putting it for days. The noise she makes is so completely unguarded that I have to stop and put my forehead against her shoulder. I have to remember that I’m thirty-five years old, and this is my father’s stepdaughter.

Then she says my name in a voice I’ve never heard from her, and I stop caring about any of that.

She comes apart faster and harder than she should, wrists still down where I put them, her whole body bowing off the couch, saying my name the entire way through like it’s the only word she knows.

I hold her through the end of it.

And I’m already reaching for my belt with the other hand when something registers.

It’s the way she moves afterward.

Not shyness. She isn’t shy—she just came apart in a near-stranger’s apartment with her hands where she was told to keep them. It’s that she doesn’t know what happens next. Her body has stopped supplying instructions, and she’s watching my face to find out what she should do next.

Nobody has ever done anything to this woman.

I take my hand off my belt.

“Kiera. How many?”

It takes her a second. Then her eyes open properly, and color blooms across her chest. I watch her consider lying and decide against it.

“None.”

“None as in not many.”

“None as in none.” Her chin comes up, which under the circumstances is magnificent.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t think it mattered.”