Chapter Six #2
Excuses line up in my mind, and Alec watches me with increasing amusement the longer I do not turn and walk toward the door. Finally, I say, “You come here.”
With a quiet laugh, he walks over to me, standing so close I feel the heat of him all along my front. “And then what?”
Can he hear my heart? I swear it’s the loudest thing in this room. “I still don’t know.”
Alec reaches down, threading his fingers with mine. Holding my hand. “This?”
“Maybe.” I am unable to stifle this grin, and he sends his other arm around my waist, pulling me against him. He tucks me into his chest and squeezes.
A hug.
“And this?” he asks.
Emotion swells thick in my throat at the familiar feel of his body and the duality of the sweet seduction of his embrace.
Every memory from our night together is sealed back into place.
I wrap my free arm around his neck, pulling his head down until he rests his forehead against mine, and like this, with eyes closed, we breathe in jagged, charged tandem for a handful of seconds.
I open my eyes to find him looking at me. Fondness blooms in my expression before I can tuck it away.
Alec smiles, pulling back. “How mad can you be if you’re looking at me like that?”
“Very mad.”
He swallows a laugh. “Your ‘very mad’ is not very intimidating.” He kisses his fingertip and gently rubs it over my heart.
“I felt stupid,” I admit, finally. “I told you about Spence. About where I work.”
“It wasn’t fair.” He presses his lips to my brow. “I’m sorry. I would have shared more but—it was selfish, I know. It was a perfect night. I worried it would vanish.”
“What are we even doing?” I ask. “We barely know each other anymore.”
“That’s not true. We may have changed a lot in the past fourteen years but just as with renovations…”
I grin up at him as we both register that he’s committed to the terrible metaphor. “We’ll always be part of each other’s foundations?” I guess.
He nods, laughing in self-deprecation. “That was bloody awful.”
“No, it was surprisingly cute.”
I take a minute to really look at him. It seems like his face should jolt me into a different kind of awareness, that his presence should now send me into shaking, nervous territory.
He’s my oldest crush and now he’s an actual celebrity.
But the electricity along my spine isn’t nerves or insecurity; it’s raw hunger.
Alec bends, hovering with his lips near mine, staring at my mouth. “You smell so good.”
“Do I?”
He hums. “I didn’t want to shower you off that morning. Wanted to feel you all over me a bit longer.” He tilts his head, breathing in deeply beneath my jaw. “It’s sugar and sex.”
His words light a fire under my skin, and I send my hand up under his shirt, feeling this body that’s immediately familiar, but with the new visuals in my head—the picture of him from Jeju Island with his shirt blown up off his beltline, exposing his tight abdomen; the way he’s so tall he has to bend to kiss me and how every fan site has written an entire feature about his perfect proportions—now I’m jolted into a new hyperaware territory.
And the mouth that is the subject of a thousand close-up photos—it’s sucking at my jaw, my neck—
I pull back, squeezing my eyes closed. “Okay. This is weird.”
He reads my tone immediately.
“No.” Alec tilts my face up to his. “Don’t do that.”
I slide my hands around his neck again. Dig fingers into his hair. His mouth hovers only a fraction of an inch away from mine and he tilts his head, waiting, letting me make the final decision.
I stretch, pulling his lower lip between mine, sucking. A helpless moan escapes his throat and he cups the back of my head, deepening the kiss with tongue and teeth, with his other hand sliding down my back to my ass, where he can hold me, grind into me.
“This,” he says when he pulls away to suck in a breath. It’s still like this, he means.
He walks backward to the bed, tugging me with him before sitting at the edge of the mattress and smiling as I straddle his lap.
Pulling back, I rest my fingertips beneath his jaw, holding him still and studying him feature by feature.
Taking him apart and putting him back together in my memory, up close.
The warm dark eyes. His perfect, straight nose.
A soft, full pout; his lips make my own mouth water. Sharp jaw, cheekbones from dreams.
“How long do we have?”
He moves his eyes without turning his head, glancing at his watch on a lifted arm. “Two hours before I have an interview here.”
Two hours isn’t that much time away from work, I reason. I’ll do this instead of eat or clean or reply to emails.
Setting my fingertip on his left cheek, I fit it into his dimple when he smiles in reaction. He leans in for a kiss.
“Be still,” I tell him, and he laughs soundlessly.
I draw a path from his forehead down his nose, across the bow of his top lip.
Alec sits patiently as his bottom lip gets traced next.
Cupping his jaw, I tilt his head up, looking at his neck.
I have a thing for masculine throats, and his is the stuff of fantasies, of dreams I wake up from sweating and hot with the urgency of unfinished business.
So it gets my attention first; I drag my tongue up the length of it, sucking on his Adam’s apple; it vibrates against my lips as he moans.
I suck his lips next, licking them, sinking my teeth into the bottom. Beneath me, he starts to move his hips, thrusting up slowly, his hands sliding beneath my shirt at my back.
I kiss his cheekbones, his eyelids. I rest my mouth against his temple, breathing in the clean smell of his shampoo. His hand makes a slow journey up under my shirt, gliding up my spine. With a quick flick of his fingers he unclasps my bra.
When I pull back, his eyes drift open and meet mine. I feel suspended in place, motionless, while it seems like he stares directly into my mind.
His gaze travels over my face as he reaches up to move a strand of my hair out of my eyes. “See? I was right.”
“You’re going to be smug now?”
“Mm-hmm.” He leans in, and whatever patient energy we managed for the past few minutes is incinerated when he kisses me.
Hot, open, his mouth slides over mine with the same vibrating desire I feel.
His big hands go back under my shirt, sliding to the front to cup both breasts as he exhales something I don’t understand.
“What did you just say?”
His lips move down my throat. “It’s prettier in Korean, but essentially I’m saying I like these on you.”
I laugh. “Boobs?”
He laughs, too, rolling me to my back so he can push up my shirt and put his mouth on my stomach, kissing his way up my body. “It’s a nicer way of admiring your curves.”
I fit my hips to his, rocking against the shape of him, hard, in his dress pants.
He grunts a quiet sound of frustration. “An unexpected oversight,” he says, and nips at my bottom lip.
“What?”
“This isn’t my room. It’s the room we’re using for interviews.”
“Is that going to be really weird later?” I ask, laughing.
“I doubt it. We’ll be out in the seating area.” He frowns. “My present concern is that my bag isn’t here.”
His meaning doesn’t immediately click. But then he flexes his hips up into me again, and… oh.
“No condoms?”
“No condoms.”
“There are other things we can do,” I say into a kiss.
“If memory serves,” he says, “we did just fine during our first round last time.” Alec takes my breast into his mouth.
I tug my shirt off and then his, and he settles over me, his skin warm and smooth.
When he kisses me, the fever rises, overtaking my instincts to be slow and enjoy every second.
I scratch down his back and know it’ll leave a mark, but it just makes him more frantic.
He pushes up onto his knees, tugging my jeans off and stilling at the sight of my underwear.
I grin up at him. “Don’t worry. I did laundry yesterday.”
He breaks into a smile, but it’s distracted, singed at the edges by heat.
“You like them on me?”
He reaches forward, sliding a finger under the fabric at my hip. “Yes.”
“They made me think of you.”
“So,” he says, stroking my skin, “you put these on today not knowing you were coming to see me?”
“Correct.”
“And even though you were angry with me?”
I nod.
He glides the finger along the curve of the silk, over my pubic bone, and then down between my legs, over my clit.
His eyes fall closed. Alec circles his finger, dipping lower, and lets out a moan as he spreads the slick heat around and around.
He pulls away, guiding me up to the head of the bed, and then climbs down between my legs.
My brain goes haywire and I actually get a head rush just imagining what he’s going to do. I need… I need more air before he does that.
“Wait.”
He looks up at me. “What?”
“I’m almost naked.”
He stares, waiting, breath impatient and hot against my stomach. “And?”
“And you’re not.”
With understanding, he backs up, standing at the foot of the bed, and reaches for his belt.
I immediately realize my mistake. Watching him take his pants off in broad daylight isn’t going to help me relax.
The buckle clicks softly, metal on metal in the quiet room.
The sound of his zipper lowering is obscene; I hear it tooth by tooth, and he bites his lip through a grin that is, I have to assume, related to whatever my face is doing while I’m watching him.
So, to retaliate, I slide my hand up my body, cupping my breast. Lightly pinching my nipple.
Alec lets out a little grunt, upping the ante in this game by hooking his thumbs under the waistband of his dark briefs, tugging them down, and freeing the hard length trapped there. And then, with his gaze on my face, he wraps his hand around it and strokes himself.
I’m moving on instinct, mouth watering, sitting up at the foot of the bed to run my hands up his thighs to his hips, pulling him one step closer so I can push his hand away and hold him steady for the long, wet draw of my tongue.