“I never meant for this to happen,” she whispered. They never should have met that day at the drive-in. She never should have kissed him in that garden shed, sending them both hurtling over a cliff, hurtling to this, to something they could never really have. “I’m so sor—”
“Don’t. I don’t want your apology. I want you. If you don’t want me too, please just stop. Stop touching me. Don’t hold my hand. Don’t look at me like—” His gaze fell to her mouth, to her soaked dress. “You look at me like—”
“Like what?” Rachel could feel herself changing, shedding an old skin that couldn’t contain her. She moved closer until the sliver of space between them was as charged as the thunder rumbling outside. “Tell me how I look at you.”
He practically lifted her from the ground. A sound burst from his throat, her name anchored to a groan. He kissed her with everything boiling inside him—the frustration, the longing. The love. But his brain couldn’t be trusted. It had been taken hostage by that look in her eyes—dark and hungry, beautiful enough to hurt. “You could fall into those eyes, right? Never stop, just keep going.” He’d dove in headfirst like the fall wouldn’t break him.
“Rachel.” He scanned her face. It had gone hazy and lust drunk. He could feel it—all that waiting and wanting arcing between them. “Is this you? Or is this the car and the storm—”
She grabbed his shirt with both hands. “I want you, Nathan. Please.”
It pierced him like a bullet. That word. Her mouth, swollen from his kisses and begging for more. Begging for him. This was what it felt like: to be wanted, and to be enough.
“Are you mine?” He kissed her again, claimed her with his tongue. “Because I’m yours.”
Rachel pulled back, but just far enough to whisper, “Yes.” Her hands slid beneath his shirt and Nathan yanked it off by the collar, nearly ripping the fabric in the process. That’s when he knew this would be different. Rougher. Dirtier. After all that time, they were starved for each other. She put her mouth on his neck, kissing and licking like she’d been thinking about it all along. Drawing a map. Then she urged him back and down, until he was sprawled on the couch and looking up at her, a siren bathed in rainwater. She raked her eyes over his body like she wanted to devour him whole.
Rachel tugged at her dress and pulled it down over one shoulder. Teasing him. Savoring this. “The night we met, you asked me a question about what I wanted,” she said, and the rasp of her voice made his stomach clench.
She pulled her arms free. “I couldn’t answer you.” The dress collapsed around her waist, revealing a white bra, soaked to transparency.
Nathan sat up so he could touch her. He had to touch her. His fingers found that indention at the top of her stomach, just beneath the lace of her bra—the soft dip before heaven. “You’d been through a lot.”
Rachel’s eyes were all shimmering want. “That’s not why I couldn’t.” She unfastened her bra as he slid his hands up and palmed her breasts. She arched her back and made sinfully grateful sounds when he tugged her nipples. “I’ve never wanted what I should,” she said. “My whole life has been selfish cravings. Guilty pleasures. Being desperate for things I can’t admit that I want out loud.”
This was how they started, with confessions and cravings, exposing all the dark places they were supposed to be ashamed of. Nathan reached beneath her skirt, prying away the strip of lace and satin, and sank two fingers inside her wet heat. She hissed and groaned as he trailed them out again, a leisurely stroke that settled into steady circles over her clit. “You can say them to me.”
He watched her eyes flutter as she rocked against his hand. “I don’t want you to be gentle,” she whispered. “And I don’t want to be careful.” She stroked his hair and kissed him, hard. “I want to make you come apart.”
She straddled his hips, rubbing herself against the rigid fabric of his jeans. It was torture. It was bliss. It was enough to spark the base of his spine but would never ease his suffering. He nearly begged her to give him more, something. Anything. But then he remembered what she said, about wanting him in pieces, and the thought coiled low, into a throbbing ache that made him groan.
Nathan thought he’d seen everything. Every part of her. But this was different. She didn’t move like the woman he’d known before. Her body practically glided over his, so sure of its beauty. He kissed her neck. She tasted like heat, salt, and rain.