Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
KELSEY
Islide my hand over his chest, broad and strong and golden like him, thinking about his answer.
It sounds reasonable, I suppose—he has mobility with a yacht, but that can’t really be it.
Plenty of people who live on boats, but I don’t know…
With him, it seems pretty obvious that there’s something more to it than just liking freedom and mobility, whatever that means.
“Being able to get away from other people is that important to you?” I ask.
“I live on a yacht where I can go anywhere I want. It’s fucking amazing.”
I smile, but I know he’s holding back. What is he running from? My thoughts go to his mother, drowning like she did. It hits me that he’s living in his mother’s graveyard.
“What is it?” he asks, because of course he has that way of seeing things.
“Nothing.”
He traps my hand onto his chest and gives me the eyebrow lift of scrutiny. “Tell me.”
I nestle back in beside him. “Fine. Okay. I was thinking about your mother. In this ocean. East Coast area of the Atlantic—”
“You think that’s why I’m out here? Because my mother drowned in this ocean?”
“I just made the connection, that’s all.”
“It was a long time ago. It was another world.”
I gaze up at him. “So you just enjoy the ocean.”
“I enjoy the ocean.” He kisses the side of my neck, leaves his lips hovering there. “I enjoy the way you shiver when I put my face to the place where your pulse beats.” He takes my lips in his.
“I enjoy...” He kisses the place just under my jaw. “This spot. Where my whiskers marked you. I keep wanting to check if it’s still there.”
My hand goes up before I can stop it, fingers finding the patch of pink-hot skin, warm under my fingertips. “That’s a weird thing to like.”
“That little part of you is mine.”
The word has weight, ballast.
“You know what I like? The little tuft of hair behind your head that won’t behave. That part of you is mine.”
“Deal.” And then his mouth is moving along the line of my jaw, slow, unhurried, and up to a spot just behind my ear.
“I like this freckle.”
“I don’t have a freckle there.”
“You do.” He kisses it once, precise. “It’s very small. You’d need elaborately positioned mirrors to see it yourself.”
“I have a freckle there?”
“A secret freckle. The size of a pinhead. It was waiting for me.”
“Was it?”
He considers. “Yes.” He kisses it again and I shiver.
I love that he notices. That he catalogs. Bruno knows where my freckles are.
I open my mouth to redirect, to bring the question back to why a man builds his life on something he can steer away from everything and everyone, but he’s pressing his hand between my thighs and, suddenly, his warm, wicked mouth is tracking down my body, lips, soft against my skin.
He presses a kiss to my mound and then he kisses between my legs.
“You jumped when I touched you here before. I’ve thought about it since. ”
“You’ve been thinking about it?”
“A lot.”
And suddenly my hand is in his hair, keeping him here.
“I like”—his breath is warm on my pussy, and my body has gone stupid with it—“the flush that climbs your chest when you’re about to come.”
I hiss out a breath.
“I like”—his hands spread my thighs wider, slow, deliberate—“the way you tremble when I hold you open.”
I’m not saying anything. I can’t let him stop now. “Keep going,” I gasp.
“Keep going...where?”
“My flower,” I say.
He lifts his head. “Did you just call it your flower?”
I groan in frustration, lifting my hips. “Kiss it.”
“I fucking love that that’s what you call it.”
“Are we going to talk about names?”
“Hell no,” Bruno says. “I just need you to know that I am going to lick your flower. I am going to explore every petal with my tongue and suck some of them in.”
The question about his mother is gone. It’s somewhere outside that window in the wind and clouds.
I tip back my head and just feel. And the man between my thighs is a man I am falling for. But that’s a problem for tomorrow’s Kelsey.