Chapter 22 Bennett
Bennett
I sit down at the edge of the bed with one arm braced on Clover’s other side as I brush a hand gently up and down her spine.
“Hey, Clo. Time for us to go.” She stretches and moans and then buries her head into her arm.
“Clover,” I try again. I just need to know that she is okay. I need her to be okay.
She rolls over with an adorable huff as her vision seems to focus. “Bennett,” she says as if she’s caught me being naughty. “Did you follow me here?” She giggles. “You did! Didn’t you?”
“I wanted to make sure you’re all right and you obviously aren’t.”
She gasps a little, the apples of her cheeks ruddy. “You’re jealous!”
I shake my head and help her up into a sitting position, but the air is sucked from my lungs when she swings a leg over my lap.
She loses her balance a little, so I hold her waist to steady her.
Those wide blue eyes stare down at me, the same color of blue as a receding wave, her lids heavy and languid. She drapes her arms over my shoulders and scoots up my lap. My body burns in response.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
The foil is mostly gone and she is in nothing more than her matching set.
The friction on my lap is sparking a physical reaction that I can’t seem to stop.
If I were standing, my knees would buckle.
Tate could open that door right now and find what I suspect to be true: that I am no different than him.
She chuffs as her head rolls back, her neck exposed, and I can’t contain my laugh. “I’m trying to be sexy and you’re making fun of me,” she purrs, her lips in a dramatic frown.
I smooth her disheveled hair back and shake my head. “At least it’s to your face.” A breathy little sigh causes her lips to puff out, and I want to do very bad things to her mouth. God, those lips. “And trust me. You’re plenty sexy.”
Her smile is pleased and smug all at once with her mouth parted just so. “I wasn’t going to hook up with him, you know. That’s why he left me up here.”
“I should have gotten here sooner.” I don’t want to argue with her right now, but I don’t think Tate left her up here indefinitely. I’m sure he was saving her for later.
Her fingers dance along the hairline at the back of my neck, and I begrudgingly remove my hands from her waist and clench the sheets at my sides to stop from touching her. I want to. I really fucking want to. But she doesn’t want that. Not really. She’s drunk and—
“Can you keep a secret?” she whispers into my ear, her tongue swiping along my lobe as she grips my hair, pulling my head back. “I’m horny.” It comes out like a whine and I want to reward her and punish her and do completely reprehensible things to her.
Her tongue licks a stripe up my neck.
The moan that escapes me is helpless and pathetic. “Clo,” I rasp as she bites and sucks and settles herself right against my erection, which appeared in no time at all.
“Did you come here to save me?” she whispers again.
“I didn’t want anyone to take advantage of you,” I manage to say.
“What if I want you to take advantage of me? Does that change anything?”
My hands are on her waist now and I’m trying to push her back. I’m trying to do the right thing. For once in my goddamn life, I’m trying to do right by her. “You can’t ask me shit like that. I’m not a good person.”
She’s not fazed by that admission in the least as she kisses and nibbles along my jawline. Her teeth bite down on my bottom lip and tug.
“When I danced with him tonight, I pretended that his hands were yours.” Her hips roll forward and her mouth finds mine again with soft, hot kisses. I part my lips, beckoning her to continue, and her tongue darts into my mouth. I lose all sense of control.
In a matter of seconds, I have one hand in her hair, and the other cradling her ass as she mewls into my mouth.
She pulls away for a moment, and her head rolls back as I rock up into her, encouraging her to chase her satisfaction.
So many of my dreams have brought me to this exact moment: us still clothed and her grinding against me, chasing whatever friction she can find.
I lick and suck along her collarbone like a starved man because I am. The only thing keeping us from each other is the small barrier of clothing between us, and I’m so tempted to slide my hand down farther to see if she’s ready for me.
A giggle bubbles up in her throat, and suddenly I’m having a moment of déjà vu and I can’t stop my brain from showing me the blurred memories of my endless drunk hookups last year that were only temporary remedies in my constant effort to forget Clover and how much I—
“Stop,” I whisper. “Clo.” My voice is firmer now. “We have to stop. Come on.”
I pull her hands away from where they are on my neck and chest, and she pouts down at me.
“We can’t,” I tell her. “I don’t want us to do something either of us will regret.”
Her brow creases with hurt as she stands up and stumbles back away from me, her arms wrapped self-consciously around her.
“Hey,” I say softly. “I just—you’re drunk.”
“It’s fine,” she spits. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you’d regret.”
Fuck, now she’s pissed and I’m still just as hard. All she has to do is push back once—maybe twice more—and I’m likely to let go of whatever scraps of morals I have for just a taste of her.
I stand up, because I’ve hurt her more than enough in this lifetime and I’d rather spend the rest of my life wondering about the taste of her, the feel of her, than hurt her again.
I hope that telling myself that over and over will make it true.
I pull my thermal off over my head and hand it to her, leaving me in my undershirt.
She shakes her head. “I don’t need it.”
“The goose bumps on your arms say otherwise.”
Like an insolent child, she stomps over toward the door, but I step in front of her. I might be a piece of shit who just put my hands all over a drunk girl while I was stone-cold sober, but I refuse to let all those clowns downstairs see her like this.
She sizes me up and must decide that it’s not worth the fight, because she yanks the shirt away from me and tugs it on over her head.
I move out of her way, and she flings the door open before tearing down the stairs and out the front door.
Tate is sitting on the porch, sipping a beer. He’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut, but when he sees me following a very unhappy Clover, he raises his bottle with a self-satisfied smirk.
She crams into the back seat with Daisy and Briar, who are both chanting, “French fries! French fries! French fries!”
Daisy leans forward and pats my shoulder like I’m her noble steed. “Uber man, bring us to the french fries!”
I glance up at the rearview mirror to see that Clover’s ego has slightly recovered as she soothes Briar about her lost Saturday night revenue.
“To the french fries,” I grumble.