Chapter 26
Rhett
Bailey’s got her knees pressed on either side of my hips, inching the front of herself up against the front of me, so she knows that there’s nothing else I’d rather do than take her right here, right now, in the kitchen. Just the feel of her kiss has me harder than I’ve ever been.
“Bay,” I growl under my breath, forcing myself to leave her kiss so I can look into those sharp green minefields, just to make sure. Dragging my thumbs across her bottom lip while I bite mine.
“Yeah?” she asks, breathlessly, almost leaning back into the kiss.
“There’s no pressure to rush—”
“Rush?” She laughs, tilting her head back so far that it nearly touches the countertop.
“We can’t rush something I’ve waited for forever,” she says.
Then, she dips her chin, drops her lashes, and draws one of my thumbs dragging across her bottom lip into her mouth, sucking down.
Circling her tongue around the tip of my nail, making the rest of my body feel like it’s been zapped by lightning, electric waves of heat melting down my hand, all the way up to my neck.
Then, she parts her lips into a smile, showing her teeth behind her lips, still biting down gently on the tip of my thumb, before asking, “You agree?”
I exhale, mesmerized, as everything around her fades to black.
“Here? Or upstairs?” I ask.
“If you make me leave this spot, I will be very, very upset,” she answers, teasing but probably a bit serious, too. “We aren’t taking any risks with any other distractions. I want you right here.”
She holds my eyes as she flicks off one of the straps of her camisole, grinning. I step back to watch her flick off the other side. Then she takes the hem of that tank top she’s wearing and arches her back to slide it up over her head, tossing the creamy white fabric into a heap on the floor.
Her nipples are already hard, and my eyes take her in as the soft line of her abs draws my eyes down to the matching waistband of her shorts.
I close the space I just opened between us to watch, then bury my lips in her neck.
She giggles and arches against me, so I dip lower, and lower, dragging a kiss down along the curve of her neck, her chest, closing my teeth around her nipple, just to make that giggle turn into a gasp.
Sucking the flesh into my mouth, circling the tip, then nipping gently, like she just did with the tip of my thumb, I get the moan that I wanted before it turns into a soft, restless pant.
I have to leave the tiny peaks of perfect rosebuds to let her pull my own shirt up over my head.
I draw her back in for a shirtless hug first, just to feel the bare skin of her body press heavily against mine, warm and humming, before bringing my lips back to hers for another frantic kiss, making up for each year that I’ve wanted to do this.
She leans back, biting her lip in a silent warning, before letting her kiss linger lower, then lower still.
Her head dips, and her tongue drags to my collarbone, before pausing.
I hold my breath to see where she goes next as gently — so fucking gently — she presses a kiss against the smallest of the scars on my shoulder.
I hear myself suck in a breath, pulling the air through my teeth, as the touch of her lips against that particular piece of skin feels foreign and raw. Nearly bringing me to my knees right here on the kitchen floor.
But I force my spine to straighten as she leans back to steady me with her eyes, looking up from beneath her perfect fringe of lashes. I barely nod her on, answering the question she doesn’t need to ask out loud.
You can’t do anything that won’t be okay.
I wrap my arms around her as she leans in again, kissing the next scar beside the first, then takes her time as she curves her spine and begins running her fingertips across the largest of the three, back and forth, just like she did the other night, before pressing her lips against that one, too.
The feel of her kiss right there is so gentle that my body hitches up against her lips before resting into the feel of them, and, slowly, so slowly, she becomes my safe haven again.
Kissing the most forbidden part of me with her lips, the stretch of marred skin where no one else has ever been allowed touch, with her fingertips, her palms, even her tongue, until they feel like any other part of me being kissed and loved.
And I have to have her.
I bring her chin back up, then wrap my fist through the longest strands of hair, tilting her lips up to meet mine again.
I lower my voice. “I don’t know what you’re doing to me, Bailey.”
“The same thing you’ve been doing to me,” she answers, “for as long as I can remember.”
“Let me have you,” I tell her.
“I’m already yours,” she whispers, leaning back in. “But I want you to show me how much you’re mine.”
“Do you want me to grab a—”
“I have an IUD,” she interrupts, smiling.
I grin and slide my hand all the way down her side, tucking it beneath the waistband of her cotton shorts, then press my palm flat against the heat of her body.
She widens her knees and leans into my kiss as my fingertips find the slit of her skin, tracing it up and down, before pressing against that tiny apex of nerves, soft and warm and wanting.
She gasps against my kiss, then arches herself against the cup of my hand, her seat pressed back on the edge of the counter.
I find her opening and slide in easily as Bailey’s whole world, and everything I’ve never allowed myself to want like this, becomes everything I’ll ever need again.
My thumb circles the sensitive peak of skin above her opening, as I release and enter her again and again. She wraps an arm around my neck with a gasp, and I can already feel her building from the pressure, her walls tightening against my grasp, but not rhythmically yet.
“I can’t wait another second to have you,” she moans, pulling back. “I want you so bad.” She tugs at the waist of my shorts and boxers, showing me exactly what she wants me to give her. I pull them both off at once, while she hops off the counter and we both kick shorts, boxers, and panties away.
Her eyes drop below my waist.
“Fourteen and a half,” she repeats my shoe size, grinning.
I smile back, but while she’s distracted, I drop to my knees and grab her hips before she can get another word out, drawing my tongue right up that center slit of her body. She nearly doubles over the top of me, shuddering harshly while hanging on to my back.
“Rhett,” she pants, “I’m not going to last nearly long enough if you keep doing that.”
“Then we’ll do this all night,” I tell her. “And again all day tomorrow.”
She pulls me back up, and I’m ready to do this standing up, or carry her up those stairs, anywhere, any way that she wants, but she pulls me in right here.
“Up,” she demands, lifting herself up onto the kitchen island and lowering herself down onto the countertop.
The sight of her lying naked like this undoes something absolutely primal inside my body.
I throw all logic out the window and climb on top of her.
She grins and opens her knees. I crawl in between them, not stopping until our lips are even, and my body is hovering over hers.
Then she kisses me again, while reaching down to help guide me in.
Her body feels like baptism by fire, hot and ready to make it easy as we keep our eyes glued to each other.
I begin to move inside of her, cradling her head beneath one of my hands, drawing in a breath as everything builds up between us.
“I am obsessed with you, Bailey Jones,” I whisper against her earlobe, then I bite onto it, making her gasp as her hips rise up to meet mine.
I close my eyes against her cheek, taking in the tiny gasps escaping her lips like candy, dissolving everything else but her, rocking into the warmth of her body over and over until it tightens around me, racked by an orgasm.
Exploding so tight that the throbbing of her walls holding me in is the final straw to mine coming next.
I come soon after, erupting as if a volcano has just unleashed, setting off a tidal wave of aftershocks and earthquakes between us.
Rocketing off the surface of the earth and into that blanket of stars.
Settling back into our bodies feels like pieces of stardust falling from the sky, because nothing else on earth could compare to what that just felt like, experiencing that with her.
I roll to the side of the island beside her, and she curls into me, breathing heavily, but suddenly laughing in a post-sex, goofy kind of adrenaline-filled way that I’ve never heard spill out of her before.
“Did we just—” she starts.
“Christen the counter?” I finish. “Yeah.”
She tucks her forehead against my shoulder, hiding another laugh. Then she leans up to kiss me again.
“I’m glad,” she says, meeting my eyes.
“About christening the counter?” I ask, ready to roll off and try this again in the bed. With a mattress.
“Yeah.” She grins lazily. “That was better than anything I could have imagined.”
“An hour ago, I would have said that’s impossible, based on what I just read.”
“And now?” she asks, shifting to watch me answer.
“Now I know that whatever I’ve imagined about you—” I brush her bangs back from her face — “the real thing is always going to be better.”