Inside Out - Lauren Dane [83]
He got it then.
“Ella, I get it. But I’m not him.”
She put her fist on the table, and he took that one too, kissing it, unfurling her fingers and wrapping them with his own. “I’m not keeping a tally, nor do I want to. I have no desire to control your life or your destiny. It’s dinner, and I’ll be taking you out a lot; it’s what couples do. You can’t pay every time, nor do I want you to. Why don’t we meet in the middle? You can pay the tip?”
“The middle is twenty percent of this meal? I told you I didn’t become a doctor because I hated math, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get math at all.”
He sighed. “Since you’re being so honest, let me be too. I hate this. I hate that, even though I know this isn’t about me, that it’s about me anyway. I don’t want to tell you what to wear or who to be friends with. I want you to be in my life because you like it. I get this, I do, but I don’t want it to be part of what we have.”
She blinked several times, peeked at the bill and tossed down a tip closer to 30 percent than 20 percent. “What? The service was very good, and they did those substitutions for us.”
He grinned, kissing her hard and fast. “All right then.”
Bundled up, they’d walked along the beach, not needing words. He kept an arm around her, loving how they fit together so well. And when they got back to the house, they’d paused on the deck, looking out over the water, listening to roaring white noise of the sea.
Funny how quickly he’d gotten used to how she looked as his woman. Having her there to put an arm around, to hold her hand. But it was his ability to touch her, touch every part of her, that he loved most. She was his to caress, to kiss and nuzzle, his to breathe in at the hollow of her throat.
He turned her to face him, the deck railing at her back. “Hi there.” He kissed her.
“Mmm. Hi yourself. I’m stuffed, warm, wrapped in your arms. Dude, this is pretty damned good as life moments go.”
He skimmed his hands up, over her hips, beneath the hem of her sweater until they found her breasts. “Love these.”
She smiled, head tipping back, body arching into his touch.
“I knew she was in there,” he murmured, nuzzling her neck as he moved the cups of her bra down to get to her nipples.
“Who?”
“The woman who arches her back to get more from me. Sensual. Beautiful. The woman who glories in her sexuality and allure.”
She snorted a laugh, and he pulled her inside.
Not bothering to stop pulling her clothes off as they made it to the pillow-strewn floor in front of the fireplace, he rolled her onto her back. “You laugh?”
“I’m so not those things. You are those things.”
“I have an aching cock that says different.” He looked at her as he eased her panties off, leaving her totally naked to his gaze. He loved that she no longer hid her scars from him. Dropping a kiss on the hollow of her hip, he licked his way to her belly button.
“It’s my turn,” she gasped out.
“I’m trying,” he said before finding her clit and giving it a lick.
“Oh. Well, that’s not what I meant, but”—she made that sex sigh he loved so much, and he wanted to laugh at how easily swayed she’d been—“I’m so easy.”
He did laugh at that while he situated himself between her thighs. “Thank God for it.”
Two orgasms later, he slid into her body just as she opened her eyes and met his. The shock of recognition made him freeze a moment at the raw intimacy of it. He was exposed. Turned upside down by the way she saw him.
She used that moment to change her position and roll him over. “I like it this way. I like looking down at the most beautiful man in creation. Naked and spread out for me.”
“You give good compliment, darlin’.” What else could he say? That he was ass over teakettle in love with her? He wanted to, but he didn’t want to scare her or move too fast.
Still, as she undulated her hips, rising and falling over his cock, she burned herself into his heart, into his soul, and there was nothing else inside but what she did to him.
He came as he looked up