A broken laugh fell off my lips, and I didn’t even recognize myself when I said, “You’ve just made my surprise look really bad.”
“I loved the surprise,” he said softly, so softly it felt like a caress. He pulled me into his body and started walking backward, pulling us into his room. “I’ll blame the surprise when I lose control tonight.”
I shook my head, a single tear helplessly creeping down my cheek. “Why?”
“Because now I know you’re happy, really happy. And this tear?” he added, pressing his mouth against my skin and tracing the wet trail with his lips. “It’s proof of how much.” He tilted my head back, kissing the brow of the culprit eye. His gaze dipped down to my lips. “Now, I can take your mouth and know that you know how I feel. That this doesn’t need to be earned. You already own the right.”
This time, it wasn’t Cameron waiting for me to cross the distance and kiss him. He did.
Cameron took my mouth, parting my lips with such hunger I had to link my arms behind his neck for support. Our tongues brushed and I pulled him to me, briskly, need pulsing in my belly, ears, limbs, chest, everywhere. And with a growl, he moved forward, dragging his hands down my throat, shoulders, waist, coming around my hips and landing on my ass. He lifted me up.
As if I’d done this a hundred times, I closed my legs around his waist. I braced my arms on his shoulders, pushing my body upward, searching for the right spot, until the junction of my thighs rubbed right against the hard ridge in his pants. His chest vibrated with a growl, and when he came up for air, the green of his eyes shone as bright as I’d ever seen a color shine. His mouth came down again, not wasting more than a second, and he grazed the side of my neck with his teeth.
I threw my head back, whimpered, and then, I was being dropped on something soft. His bed.
A cloud of his scent enveloped me. The sensation made my chest so full, so packed to the brim with bliss, that I swore I could fly.
“That smile” was all but growled from the foot of the bed. I looked over at Cameron. My lips didn’t waver. “Come here,” he said, tugging at my foot. “I need that smile against my mouth.”
His hands wrapped around my ankles and I let him drag me all the way to where he was. I went up on my knees and met his gaze, still smiling, still feeling so full I might burst. I crossed the distance, pressing my mouth to his, doing as he asked.
A groan left him and then he was grazing his lips all over my face. Sweet but firm caresses that went up and down and left and right, making shivers spread and twinkle down my arms.
“I’ve never wanted anyone like this,” I whispered against his mouth, placing my palms on his shoulders. One short breath left me. And I let my fingers fall down his torso, until I reached the hem of one of his fleeces that I now loved so much. I closed my fists around the fabric. “I’ve never felt this safe, this cherished, this wanted, this…” Loved. “I want you so bad.”
Cameron’s body shook. With restraint, with need, with that emotion I was so scared to voice? I couldn’t know. I didn’t think I cared. Not right in that moment as I felt his hands come around mine and tug up. “Undress me,” he said in barely a rasp.
I pulled it up, his hands leaving mine to help when I couldn’t reach all the way up his arms. A beautiful collage of ink and skin was revealed before me. A new kind of need reeled in. The need to touch, memorize, brand, and make him mine.
“Show me,” he told me, pushing his body against my hands. “Show me how bad you want me.”
Deliberately slowly, I pressed my lips to his chest, right above his heart, marked with the design of a rose. I could feel his muscles flexing in response. His skin was so smooth, so solid and hard, and his heart drummed briskly, almost too fast. I grazed my teeth over all that ink, and his hand landed on the back of my neck.
I moved upward, leaving a trail of open-mouthed kisses all the way to the bottom of his throat, feeling his fingers slip into my hair. I nipped at the skin, a little harder this time, and a groan came from his lips. It felt amazing to have such an imposing man crumbling down under my touch like that.
My eyelids fluttered closed at the thought, and before I could anticipate his next move, he was bringing us both down on the bed.
His scent blanketed me, filling my lungs again, feeling like more. His weight pressed so sweetly against me that I circled my arms around his neck and pushed him down. Cameron resisted, his hand right by my head.
“I’m going to knock down every wall left standing,” he said against my ear, his other hand moving, climbing up my side, and taking the fabric of my sweater and shirt with it. “And once I’m inside,” he rasped, the pads of his thumbs reaching the underside of my breast. He moved his fingers over my bra, roughly, desperately. “I’m going to bury myself so deep into you”—he brought the lace down, making my breast topple out—“that you won’t be able to tell where you end and where I start.”