Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Morgan
My pulse thunders in my ears and pounds behind my ribs. My skin feels too tight and my stomach is fluttery and weightless and my nipples ache behind the flannel shirt.
Noah is shirtless, wearing nothing but a pair of faded, well-worn blue jeans that fit like a glove.
He's barefoot, too, and somehow, that's just unbearably sexy.
His chest is thick and hard and brawny, dusted with dark body hair growing in tight whorls.
I rest my chin on his shoulder and look up at his face from a little too close, watching his dark blue eyes reflect his reaction—a clearing of confusion, arousal, amusement… but mostly arousal.
I trace the patterns in the way his chest hair grows, teasing and raking my fingernails lightly over his hot skin and hard muscle.
My own desire bubbles and percolates inside me—last night was an ignition of the pilot light of my libido, I think.
Being undressed, feeling his hands caress my flesh, his eyes devour my body. For the first time in what feels like a lifetime, I felt sexy. Feminine, in a way I haven't in so, so long. Even on the couple of dates I've been on, I never really felt…
Turned on.
Like a sexual creature.
The insecurities are still there. The vicious, nagging voice of my ex still whispers criticisms of my body, filling my psyche with doubts and fears.
But right now, attraction to Noah is louder. The way he kissed me? The way he touched me? I was on fire for a few moments. Delirious with need. Vibrating with arousal. Ready to take pleasure and give it.
I refuse to let the insecurity win.
I will not.
I just have to hope that Noah possesses enough patience to get past all that.
For a moment, his gaze flits away from me, staring at nothing. "Like what?" he repeats.
Slowly, his attention focuses on me—starting at my face, my eyes.
He searches me, and I hope he sees the desire I feel and not just the worry that I'll panic again, the fear that he'll get sick of my freight train full of baggage and not want me anymore, the terror that he'll suddenly find me as unattractive as my ex-husband did.
My lungs stop functioning correctly as I feel his gaze skitter down from my eyes to my throat, to the dip of my cleavage, to the curve of my thigh bared where my borrowed button-down ends.
His eyes return to mine. Bold. Assertive. Rife with desire. Instead of answering with words, he lets his gaze return to my thigh, and then his hand settles on my knee. I'm curled up in a tight ball, facing him, with my knees drawn up to my chest, angled toward him and resting on his thigh.
My mouth goes dry as he inches his hand up my leg. The calluses on his hand scrape over my skin, making me tingle all over. His eyes find mine again, assessing as his touch slides toward my bottom. My lower lip catches in my teeth as he carves his hand over my backside, cupping the curve of it.
"This, to start with," he whispers. "How's this?"
I nod. "I…I like it." Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I tilt closer to him, press my lips to the rough stubble where he trims his beard line at his neck. "What else?"
"Morgan, if you start to feel—"
"I'll tell you." I trail my fingertips over his belly, above his navel. "What else, Noah?'
He licks his lips, exhales softly. Searches my face.
And then he's twisting in place, grabbing me by the hips and lifting me over him, settling me astride him.
My thighs wedge around his hips as I sit tall on him.
My hair is wild around my face, the tail of the flannel is riding up around my waist, baring the scarlet of my thong and the crease where my hips bend.
With his eyes firmly locked on mine, he runs his hands up my thighs to cup my ass where it spreads wide on his lap.
"This."
I don't know what to do with my hands. I want to touch him, badly…but I want even more badly to feel his touch. To experience pleasure that I haven't given myself. I just don't know how to voice that—how to ask for what I want.
"I like that too," I whisper.
I shift my weight forward, so I'm not sitting so much on his thighs but on his lap. His crotch. I feel his arousal pressing against my core, a thick hard ridge behind the cold metal of his zipper. I hold his eyes, hiding nothing. Not my fears and certainly not my need.
His hands rest on my thighs again, pause, grip the creases, thumbs pressing into soft flesh just above the waistband of my thong. My breath catches—willing his touch to explore.
They do, just not where I was thinking.
He flicks open a button, and the flannel shirt drapes open, exposing the inner halves of my breasts. I rest my hands on his shoulders, trail my fingers down his chest. My gaze drops to his abdomen, to the button of his fly, and I wonder if I possess the courage to go there.
I don't know if I do, yet.
He undoes another button, and now only two keep the shirt closed.
Another. I hold his eyes, swallowing hard and trying not pant with desperate fear as he slips the last button open.
He cups the sides of my neck, under the curtain of my glossy black hair.
His eyes ask the question, and my answer is to lean into him, curl my arms around his neck, and touch my mouth to his.
A soft quiet sound escapes him, then—part sigh, part moan. It is intensely erotic.
His tongue quests gently into my mouth, and I answer his moan with a shrill gasp of my own. I tilt one way and he the other, deepening the kiss as our mouths fuse and tongues tangle.
Noah slips his fingers under the shirt at my shoulders, fingertips tracing a line down my neck to the caps of my shoulders, subtly pushing the shirt backward. I bury my hands in his hair and roll my shoulders, letting the garment slip backward. Tug one arm free, and the other.
And just like that, I'm naked again, but for the thong.
Noah clutches my face, leaning into me, kissing me with a fierceness I can't quite believe.
And then he breaks, leans back. His eyes fix on my breasts. "Fuck, you're beautiful."
I blush hard, cheeks burning. "Noah."
"You are." His eyes flick from my eyes to my chest several times, as if he wants to make eye contact but can't quite rip his gaze away from my boobs; to be perfectly honest, I like that he can't stop looking. "Breathtaking."
"I like how you look at me," I admit, whispering. "A lot."
"I can't stop staring," he mutters.
I take his hands from where they rest on my thighs just above my knees and guide them to my breasts. "So don't."
"I don't want you to think that I—"
I nip his lower lip to silence him, groaning softly when his hands gently squeeze my breasts, gasping when he scrapes his thumbs over my erect, sensitive nipples.
"No one has looked at me as an object of desire for a very long time, Noah," I murmur, arching into his touch.
"It feels so good to be looked at like that.
To feel like you like what you see…it's a gift. "
"Then allow me to shower you with gifts," he answers, letting his gaze rake over my body, lingering on my breasts, down to my belly, to the triangle of scarlet lace, darkened by the dampness of my arousal.
When his eyes fix there, I stop breathing and the burn of my blushing cheeks is so hot it hurts.
My heart is palpitating, pounding, crashing, thundering.
His hands roam down my ticklish, tender sides, pause at my hip creases again—he seems to like that spot. Already struggling with my breath, which now comes in short, shuddery gasps, when his thumbs slide inward and trace the gusset of my thong, I again stop breathing entirely.
"Hey, hey—breathe, sweetheart," Noah murmurs, the corners of his mouth tipped up in a half-smirk.
I can barely swallow past the tightness of my throat. "T-trying."
"Would this help?" he nuzzles my mouth with his.
"Yes," I huff, the answer a soft sigh as much as speech.
He teases me with his lips, pulling away when I lean in, again and again until I mewl in frustration, leaning forward to crush my mouth against his, clutching the back of his neck in my hands so he can't pull away; I need his kisses to breathe.
When I burrow my tongue into his mouth, he growls softly. His thumbs slip under the elastic of the gusset, up high, at the curve of my hip crease.
“This okay?" he whispers.
I nod, my forehead rolling against his.
No longer kissing him, I hold his face in my hands and try to breathe as he presses his thumbs further inward, toward my center…toward my sex.
"Take a deep breath for me, Morgan."
I focus on breathing—inhaling slowly, filling my lungs and holding, letting it out slowly, slowly, through pursed lips, eyes closed. My lips tingle as oxygen floods my starved system.
"Again." I take another slow, deep breath. “Good, honey. Keep breathing. Close your eyes and breathe. It's just you and me. I want you to feel good."
I nod, focusing on my breathing, reminding myself that I want this. I want him to touch me. I fill my mind's eyes with the expression on his face when he saw my breasts for the first time—awed, aroused, stunned, eager.
He rubs his thumbs up and down under the lace of my thong, caressing the silky skin to either side of my sex.
His touch is centimeters away. He kisses my mouth, steals my tongue and greedily devours it, pouring jet fuel on the crackling inferno of my arousal.
I whimper, lean in. Kiss him back, kiss him harder.
Clutch his waist, palm his pecs, feel the hard nubs of his flat little nipples, the column of his throat, the bulge of his biceps.
Kiss him and kiss him, touch him everywhere I can find skin—the broad expanse of his back and shoulders, the hard plane of his flat, anvil-hard stomach.