Chapter 30
Every time James kisses her, it’s different.
He gave her urgency in the rain and slow, agonizing precision in the museum. This time, when they’re surrounded by the slumbering camp, it’s a breathless, silent secret.
He unzips her hoodie, puts his mouth to the places he’s revealed.
The night air is velvety against her neck where his lips have been; the moon spills pale light over his dark hair and uncompromising cheekbones.
He drifts his trembling knuckles down the tender skin of her chest, then over the thin pink cotton that doesn’t at all disguise the peaks of her nipples.
He slides his hand inside the hoodie and runs into bare skin below her shoulder. He jerks his fingers back like a boy who’s accidentally gotten a handful of boob.
“It’s what I wear on hot nights,” she says, showing him where she’s cut the collar and sleeves off a bargain-bin tourist T-shirt. It’s comfortable, but the coverage isn’t reliable. She doesn’t usually wear it unless she’s alone.
She wore it tonight, though.
James’s hand returns to the ragged cotton edge of the makeshift tank top. His fingers rub the curled-up fabric before sliding inside to circumscribe the wide, deep armholes, which she cut almost down to her navel.
“Sweet Christ, Ripley.”
His voice cracks the way it might have when he was a teenager, and she suddenly wishes for that past James with a ferocity that takes her by surprise.
She’s greedy for every moment of his life.
She wants her own past self to have comforted a young, sad, lost James.
Years from now, she wants to take the face of an older, distinguished, still-handsome man between her palms and kiss him good morning.
She wants seven generations of a family that includes both of them.
But all they have is now.
She lifts up on her tiptoes to press her lips against the curve of his, to know him now in every way she can.
“Knickers off this time,” she whispers, unzipping his stretchy jacket. The contrast between the stuffiness of his pin-striped pajama set and the stupefying beauty of his body is bewilderingly hot.
“Everything Now: The Ripley Adams Story,” he murmurs, amused.
His breath brushes the hypersensitive spot beneath her ear.
He pins her with one hand on her lower back and the other underneath her shirt, squeezing and stroking.
She can feel the thick, hot push of him in a line from her lower belly to well past her navel.
“What’s wrong with that?” she asks, biting his chest through his shirt to feel him shiver.
“Fair. Knickers off,” he agrees, the words strained.
“But not…not inside you. Fuck,” he says wretchedly, like he’s looking at the thing he wants most in the world from the other side of inch-thick glass.
“I want to, Ripley. You have no idea how much I fucking want to. But you love discovery, and I want us to have something left to discover. We don’t have to rush. ”
“Patience is overrated, James.”
“That’s not what you thought last time,” he says, his voice as dark as his eyes.
“You want to win this argument? Fine, you win.” He gasps as she palms him through his shorts, pulls away with a shudder, then pushes back into her hand.
His head is thrown back, neck exposed, teeth biting cruelly into his lower lip.
To see him struggle for control is every bit as glorious as she’d imagined.
She’s dying to have all of him, but she’ll take what she can get. She’ll take every piece he gives her and every piece he lets slip through his fingers. She wants to watch him lose himself and know that she’s the reason.
He claims her mouth in a greedy, ransacking kiss, like he wants everything too. He fumbles behind his back, grabs his weekend bag, tosses it aside.
“Hey!” Ripley protests, spying the sketchbook on the mattress. “You’re going to ruin your—”
“I don’t care,” he says.
“I care.” She snatches the book and lays it gently under the bed, barely muffling a shriek as he hoists her sideways across his lap, his erection jumping against her thigh.
He takes the hem of her shirt and pulls it over her head.
The look on his face is the best thing that’s ever happened to her, until he braces her against one solid arm and lowers his mouth.
He murmurs soft things: Beautiful and I want and I wish.
He does this until she’s biting her fist, arching against the air, shaking from not getting what she needs.
“James, I—”
“Shush, my darling,” he says, his whisky voice so intoxicating, she wants to throw a match at it and watch the fumes catch fire. “Lie back.”
He lays her down like she’s worth a hundred sketchbooks of irreplaceable drawings.
“Lift your pretty arse.” He throws her stripped-off shorts over his shoulder and places a pillow under her hips.
Her pelvis tilts up, her thighs rolling apart.
He sucks air through the fingers covering his mouth and groans a muffled series of syllables that sound absolutely fucking filthy.
“Quiet now, all right?” he whispers, his commanding tone undercut by the way his hands tremble as they slide up the insides of her thighs.
Ripley will do anything if it means he won’t stop. She’ll lie here for a thousand years, which is how long it takes for him to get down on his stomach and up on his elbows, his beautiful hands nudging her open.
His mouth makes her want to scream, but she manages to turn the sound into a tiny, breathy whimper.
Every touch of his tongue is slow and thorough and meant to make things last, and she can tell it’s going to be over too fast. She wants to slow down—to stay where they are, like this, for as long as they can.
“James, I—”
“Yes, my darling. I know.” He backs off, blowing a soft stream of air at her clit, and she’s going to die from this.
“You won’t die, Ripley,” he says, sounding amused.
God, she said it out loud. “Don’t get…all cocky, Professor. It’s not that…big of a deal.”
He stifles a laugh against the inside of her thigh. “Oh, well, in that case,” he murmurs, going back to work. Her hips buck uncontrollably at the lightest touch of his tongue. He stops when she gets close again. “Too big of a deal?” he asks, pretending to be concerned.
“Goddamn it, James.” She’s a mess, her skin sheened with sweat, her voice almost a sob. His double-curved smirk is destroying her heart as thoroughly as his mouth is destroying her body.
“How I love it when you’re cross, my darling. Your cheeks get all pink, and you—”
“You conceited British ass,” she says, reaching for his ears. “I swear to God I will—”
He holds her down with embarrassingly little effort, and then he doesn’t have to hold her down at all, because he’s sending his tongue into her again. Before she can tell him how easy it will be to push her over the edge, it’s too late.
The orgasm is obliterating, wiping out everything except his low hum of approval and a pleasure so blindingly sweet that for a long, long moment, she doesn’t know where or when she is.
He stays with her, his movements soft and slow as she comes down.
Every so often he pauses, shifting his weight away, then returns.
When she’s pretty sure her vision is restored, she cracks one eye open. James is taking savoring tastes like she’s an ice cream bar, then looking up to see her reaction.
“You’re watching me?” Her voice is rough, like a burst of static.
“I’m a scientist, Ripley. I observe.” He dips his mouth again, keeping his eyes on hers. It’s maybe the hottest thing she’s ever seen.
I’m the scientist. You’re an artist, she thinks as he does it again. The next time he dips down, his eyes dark and serious, she comes again in a sudden jolt, shaking like he’s found a fault line inside her and given it a good hard shove.
This time, she takes it all in—the surprised, pleased puff of his breath, the softness of his hair in her fists, the clench of his fingers underneath her hips. She can feel the rhythm of his desire as he presses himself into the mattress, eases back, presses again.
He likes this. He gets hot when he’s got his tongue between her thighs. Hot when she comes.
Oh, yeah, this is going to ruin her.
He stands up and tears off his pajamas in two quick movements.
He’s so beautiful, Ripley can’t breathe for a second.
So alive it’s almost unreal. The moonlight throws shadows on every muscle, dipping into the puckered edges of his scar and back out again.
His dragon is a flicker of wings in the dark, visible and then not.
His eyes feast on her, his hand drifting absently to his hard, glistening cock.
He comes back to bed on his knees, pulls the pillow from beneath her hips, and puts his thighs between her legs, nudging them up and apart.
He kneels for a moment, looking down at her while he tugs once, twice, his face contorted.
“Will you…” He brings her hand around him, squeezing to show her how hard.
“This is what you want?” she asks, encircling as much of him as her smaller hand can manage. He’s big and hot against her palm, the crown of his cock flushed and shining. She swirls her thumb through the slick at his tip. Emotion cascades across his face: agony, longing, pleasure, amazement.
“Yes,” he grits out. “I want to be…here. Close to you. Above you. I want to kiss you when I…ah, Ripley.” He drops to all fours, his head hanging low, his face in the crook of her neck.
He’s uncoordinated now, his breathing quick and uneven, and he’s making little gasping, hitching groans between a river of words: You taste so good you feel unbelievable it’s never been like this for me it’s like I’m fucking eighteen oh God Ripley God Ripley God.
She should stretch this out, make it last for him the way he wanted to for her. But the thought of him finishing fast and out of control is too tempting. She wants to unearth this echo of his past and study it. Know it.
Own it.