12. Evie #2
I smile through the tears threatening my eyes. “You.”
“Evie,” he says, his voice low. A warning and a question both.
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?”
“For once,” I say, “yeah.”
And I kiss him.
For a second, he doesn’t move, like he can’t believe the thing he’s wanted is happening on its own. Then his hands come up and frame my face carefully, the way you’d cup water you didn’t want to lose, and he kisses me back like he’s been starving and too proud to say so.
He kisses me slowly. That’s the thing that undoes me first. There’s no rush in it.
There’s the whole night in it. His thumbs trace my cheekbones, and his mouth moves over mine, deliberate and unhurried, learning me again.
I remember this—God, I remember this, the carefulness, the attention he gave me in Bigfork.
He saw me that night because he notices everything about me, and that knowledge humbles me.
“Take me to bed,” I murmur against his mouth.
He walks me backward, not releasing my mouth, and lowers me to the mattress like I’m breakable.
“Slow,” he says against my lips. “We’ve got all night. Nobody’s leaving before dawn this time.”
He’s carried the fact that I climbed out of his bed in the dark for four months, and he’s not throwing it at me; he’s setting it down gently and telling me it’s over.
My body throbs. I love his touch. A pulse thrums between my thighs, where I’m already swollen and wet for him.
He undresses me slowly, sliding my jeans and panties down my legs. My shirt is next as he flicks the buttons open one at a time, his warm knuckles feathering over my sternum as he removes my bra.
He’s seen me naked before, but my body has undergone subtle and not-so-subtle changes with my pregnancy.
“Gabe?”
His name comes out breathless. A little hesitant. A little nervous.
Gabriel pauses and simply looks at me, his breath ragged, his gaze drifting up and down my body. “Christ, look at you, Evie. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful.”
He focuses on my stomach, awe and reverence in his eyes as his hand slides over the small bump to cup our child.
Slowly lowering his head, he presses the gentlest of kisses to my skin where our child is growing.
He closes his eyes for a long moment, his palm spread wide over the gentle curve of my belly as though he’s trying to memorize it.
“Our girl,” he murmurs.
The words undo me every time.
From the moment we saw that tiny heartbeat on the screen, she’s been our girl.
His hand moves from my stomach to cup my breast, kneading gently, working the nipple between his fingers. “Are you more sensitive here now?”
I nod, unable to speak around the tightening of my throat, shivering at the raw sensuality in his voice.
“Then I’ll be extra careful.”
He touches and strokes, alternating until my nipples are so hard that they ache. The simplest brush across them sends a current of desire streaking through my lower abdomen.
And then his mouth is on my breasts, warm and open, his tongue dragging slowly over my nipples until I arch up off the bed.
“Tell me,” he says, his mouth moving down again to the small curve of my belly, “if it’s too much. Or not enough.”
“More,” I manage. “It’s—God, Gabriel—more.”
His mouth trails lower, and when he settles between my legs and looks up the whole length of me with those impossible eyes, I forget how to do anything but want.
“Mine,” he says.
The word lands wrong and right and terrifying all at once. Possessive. A word I should hate. My father used words like that about companies, land, people he thought belonged to him.
But Gabriel doesn’t say it like a man taking. He says it like a man who can’t quite believe he’s been given something precious. Like he’s afraid if he breathes too hard, I’ll disappear.
Mine.
It goes through me like heat.
“Yours,” I hear myself say, and I have never said that word to a living soul.
Then his mouth is on me. He drags his tongue through my folds, unhurried at first, learning the sounds I make.
When he finds my clit, he settles there with a focus that empties my head completely.
One of his hands pins my hip. The other slides up, and I lace my fingers through his because I need to hold on to something.
He grips back as his tongue works me in tight, delicious circles that push me toward an orgasm with frightening speed.
I whimper as I ride his face, wondering if the pleasure might destroy me.
“That’s it,” he says against my slick flesh, the words buzzing through me. “That’s it, darlin’, right there—”
I shatter.
My climax rolls up through me and folds me in half.
I chant his name, grinding against his mouth, one hand fisted in his hair.
He holds me through all of it, drags it out, and doesn’t stop until I’m shaking and pushing weakly at his head because it’s too much and it’s everything.
It’s the most undone I have ever been in my life, and I have only ever been undone by this one man.
He kisses the inside of my thigh and crawls up the bed, gathering me against his chest, his heart going wild under my cheek.
“Gabe?”
“Mm?”
“One of us has too many clothes on.”