Chapter 3 #2
Both of them, wide, heavy, his fingers spreading across my hips, pulling me into him.
He kissed me back and the heat of it went through me so hard my knees buckled.
His mouth was firm, hungry, certain, a man who’d been thinking about this and knew exactly how he wanted it.
He kissed me the way he did everything. Thoroughly. With his whole body behind it.
I grabbed the front of his cut and pulled him closer and the sound he made against my mouth was low and rough and it vibrated through my chest. His hands tightened on my hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh there, gripping me, holding me against him.
The pressure of his grip was perfect. Demanding.
A man who wanted to hold on to me and wasn’t pretending otherwise.
My back found the bike. He’d walked me into it, or I’d walked myself into it, I couldn’t tell, but the seat was against the backs of my thighs and he was pressed against the front of me and I was pinned between cold metal and hot skin and I didn’t want to be anywhere else on earth.
His chest was hard against my breasts, the leather of his cut rough through my shirt, and I arched into him and felt his breath stutter against my mouth.
He kissed my jaw. Where the bone met the soft skin below my ear, and my head fell back and the sound I made was embarrassing, involuntary, and I didn’t care.
His mouth moved down my neck, his stubble scraping against my skin, his lips finding the place where my pulse was hammering.
He stayed there. Kissing me there, his tongue hot against my throat, his hands still gripping my hips, his thumbs stroking slow circles just above the waistband of my jeans.
“Duke.” His name in my mouth, breathless, wrecked. I sounded like a woman I didn’t recognize. I was suddenly a woman who wanted things and a woman who reached for them.
He came back to my mouth. Kissed me deeper, his tongue sliding against mine, slow, deliberate.
The length of him pressed against my stomach, hard, unmistakable, and the knowledge of what I was doing to him sent a bolt of heat through me so intense I whimpered against his mouth.
I rolled my hips against him, instinctive, chasing the pressure, and the groan that tore out of him was guttural, animal, the sound of a man losing a fight with himself.
His hand slid up from my hip. Over my waist, my ribs, the underside of my breast. He cupped me through my shirt, his palm warm, his fingers shaping around me, his thumb grazing my nipple through the fabric, and my whole body jerked into his hand.
The sensation was so sharp, so good, that I gasped, my fingers digging into his shoulders, pressing myself harder into his palm because I wanted more, wanted his hands everywhere, wanted his mouth where his thumb was, I wanted the rest of this, the whole of it, right here on this mountain with the sky turning purple and his body heavy against mine.
But he pulled back.
The effort of it was visible. Every line of his body tight, his breathing ragged, his hand still on my breast, his face inches from mine.
I could see what it was costing him. The want in his face, raw, unconcealed, a man looking at me like I was the only thing in the world and fighting himself not to take what I was offering.
“Trixie.” My name, rough, barely held together.
“I know,” I said. Because I did. Too fast. Too much. Too soon.
His thumb moved against my nipple one more time, slow, deliberate, a parting that was also a promise. Then he took his hand away, stepped back. The cold air rushed between us and I almost pulled him back.
He stood there. Breathing hard, his hands at his sides, his fingers curling and uncurling like he was trying to remember what to do with them now that they weren’t on me. His eyes moved over my face, my mouth, my chest, and the hunger in that look was so raw it made my stomach clench.
“We should head back,” he said. His voice was wrecked. Sandpaper and gravel. “Before I stop being a gentleman about this.”
I wanted to tell him to stop being a gentleman about it. The words were right there. But the wanting was so new, so fragile, that I was afraid of breaking it by moving too fast.
“Okay,” I said.
We got back on the bike. My arms around his waist, my body against his back, the engine vibrating between my thighs doing nothing to help stop the heat burning through me.
Everything was the same as the ride up but also nothing was the same because now I knew what his mouth felt like, knew the sound he made when I pressed against him, knew the size of his hand on my breast and the way his grip tightened on my hips when he wanted me.
The ride back was twenty minutes of exquisite torture, my body lit up, aching, pressed against a man who was in the same condition.
Every lean into a corner pushed us tighter together and I felt him breathe differently each time.
He dropped me at Rosie’s. I swung off the bike and stood on the sidewalk. I looked at him and he looked at me. The air between us was so thick with everything we hadn’t finished that I could barely breathe through it.
“Goodnight, Trixie,” he said.
“Goodnight, Duke.”
He rode away. I watched him go, the taillights disappearing down Main Street, the sound of the engine fading into the dark.
Rosie’s house was next door to the diner, a small clapboard place with a porch light she left on. I knocked and she opened the door with Ruby asleep against her shoulder, the teddy dangling from one limp fist.
“Good ride?” Rosie asked. Her eyes moved over my face, my flushed cheeks, my swollen mouth, and she smiled the smile of a woman who already knew the answer.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good ride.”
She handed Ruby over, warm and heavy with sleep, and I carried her the few steps back to the diner and up the stairs to our apartment. I put her to bed, kissed her forehead, closed her door.
I stood in the small apartment above the diner with my back against the wall and my fingers pressed to my lips and my body still humming from every place he’d touched me.
I wanted him. Because his hands felt like something I’d been missing and he’d listened without fixing. Because my daughter trusted him and because he was asking for nothing from me. For the first time in six years, I felt like a woman. Not a wife. Not a role.
I didn’t sleep for hours because I felt too alive and my body was humming.