How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [100]
“Do I?”
He bends, presses a kiss to my neck. “Yes.” His hands slide around me, over my waist and back, down around the curve of my bottom. “We’re adults now,” he says. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Yeah?” I look at his mouth, sway against him. “Like?”
“Depends. Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“No,” he says, and smiles. “But that’s all right.” Holding my gaze, he slides a hand down my leg and crumples the fabric of my skirt, pulling it upward until my leg is bare and his fingertips are skimming over the skin, up the back of my thigh to my buttock. One finger slides beneath the elastic. It feels decidedly more intimate to have our eyes locked as he does this, and I glance away. He stops.
I look up. He smiles, bends, and captures my lower lip, suckling it for a moment, and I feel a jolt of heat. I reach for his shoulders, wanting to pull him into me, and he resists. “Fold your hands. And keep your eyes on me,” he murmurs. His hand begins to move again, lightly skimming over the infinitesimal hairs on my body, along the back of my thigh, around my buttocks, beneath my panties.
It’s hard to keep my eyes locked with his. To keep looking deep into the honeyed irises. I feel revealed. Anxious. I capture his hand, and he smiles.
“My turn.”
He stands straight and looks at me. I reach for the buttons of his shirt; he doesn’t move. I unbutton it, then put my hands on his chest, not looking down, just feeling it. Nipples and hair and ribs, belly and belly button, sides. He takes one of my hands and puts it over his erection, holding my gaze, and I take one of his hands and put it on my breast. “Shall we go upstairs?” I ask.
“Oh, no. Not tonight.” He shrugs out of his shirt. “My turn again.”
This time he tugs the bottom of my tank top and pulls upward. I lift my arms and he skims it off, tossing it aside, then takes off my bra. Only the tips of his fingers touch me, circling my shoulders, stroking my breasts, curling around to cup them, brushing over my nipples. It’s very difficult to stand there, looking into his eyes, and I see that he’s struggling, too. His nostrils flare.
“I don’t think I can keep looking only at your eyes,” he says, a dark glitter in his own. “But don’t move, all right?”
Caught in the dream, I nod ever so slightly as he leans over me, cups my breasts with a sigh, and kisses them, as lightly as he has touched me all over. Every nerve in my body is on alert, and when he grazes my forearm, I shudder.
He pulls me into a kiss, and our bare skin brushes. His hands run up my back, down. I wrap my arms around him, pull his head into me, feeling as if I might dissolve right here.
And it’s a thousand times better than I could have imagined. His scent envelopes me and ignites every sensor on every square centimeter of my skin. His hands leave trails of red lava over my back, my shoulders, my neck. When he kisses the bare flesh of my shoulder, moving mouth and tongue over my skin, I pull up his shirt in the back to touch his skin.
“Jesus,” he whispers, “I love kissing you.” His hand moves on my neck, my shoulder, over the square of skin on my chest. “Touching you.” I even like the hectic way he looks when he says it, color high across his cheekbones.
He resumes kissing my neck, my throat, which makes my spine soften, and I’m exploring the skin of his back, his sides, his ribs, feeling ripples as my fingers cross the terrain, his thick, cool hair, feeling the shape of his skull as his hands slide lower. He pulls himself up to my mouth and kisses me again. His hands are still, his erection pressed into my thigh.
He shifts, lifts his head. He’s breathing hard. “That’s as much as I can stand and still stop.”
I’m flushed from breast to thighs. “We aren’t stopping!”
“Yes, we are.” He gives me a wicked little wink. “Second base.” He shakes out my tank and bra, gives them to me.
“Why?”
“Because I won’t want you to leave, and you will have to get up and go, to Katie.”
I nod.
“And because,” he