Page 19 of South Beach Bodyguards

Because what he didn’t know was that what I was really waiting for was him.

And I wasn’t saving myself for marriage. Just for the right moment.

Maybe that moment was sooner than I’d thought. Saliva was thick in my mouth. With him I could get over my fears. With him the appeal was too great to let my insecurities hold me back. When you had a crush this deep and intense and irrational it could get you over the hump. The thought made me smile and he stood there frowning at me.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Of course I’m sure that I absolutely cannot touch you.”

“I’m not.” Then while I was trying to work up the nerve to say something or do something to entice him, he swore and chucked the condoms into the wastebasket next to the dresser.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his voice tight, eyes intense.

“I mean that I want you to.”

He reached out, like he was going to draw me to him, and I leaned forward, aching with the need to have Ryan’s hand on me. But he stopped himself.

“Isabel. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

That made me bristle. I was tired of being treated like a child. No one seemed to have noticed that I had grown up, you know, like four years ago. Being sexually inexperienced didn’t make me an infant. “I may be a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them. I know what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying?”

So he wanted me to spell it out. Fine. I never thought I would have the chance. I wasn’t going to let it pass me by. I might never get another opportunity to tell him how I felt and what I wanted.

“I want to have sex with you. I have for at least a year.”

“I thought you said you weren’t stupid,” Ryan said, looking frustrated.

I lifted my chin. The words were out there, and I couldn’t take them back, so I had to follow through. “I have a four point oh grade point average.”

For a long, agonizing moment, he didn’t say anything at all.

But then Ryan said, “Fuck it.” He put his hand around my waist. “Come here, you sexy little brainiac.”

six

I wasn’t going to have sex with Isabel. I couldn’t, no matter how hard my dick was and how much I wanted to bury it inside her. It would be literally the worst thing I could do to a person who deserved better than me. But I could kiss her. Just one, never-to-be-repeated taste of her lips beneath mine. Then I would be done and she would come to her senses and realize I wasn’t worth her time.

Tugging her body closer to me, I studied Isabel’s face. She was so beautiful, her dark eyes big and expressive, with such thick eyelashes. Her mouth was full, plump, her smile a little crooked, revealing a single dimple. I brushed my thumb over it. She shivered beneath my touch.

The plan was just to drop my head, have a brief, fleeting, platonic, kind of, kiss. But of course that wasn’t what happened. We locked eyes, and I swear to God, the fucking tile floor cracked and shifted under my feet. It was a look I had never seen on a woman’s face and it was so beautiful, so sexy, that my intention to keep distance between us evaporated. It was gone. Forgotten.

She was already up on her tiptoes, meeting me, head tilted back. Her mouth parted, opening for me. If she were flirty or smirking, I could have resisted. But this, who the fuck was I kidding? Just one real kiss. That’s it. Then no more. So I helped raise her up even further, and I bent to eliminate the remaining distance between us. She was already reaching for my neck, sliding her hands over my shoulders.

Then my mouth was on hers, and we were kissing. There was nothing tentative on either of our parts, and damn it, she tasted just as good as I could have imagined. Her lips were full, soft, sweet. She sighed and opened her lips further so I could take her harder, deeper. It gave me an unexpected jolt of hot, pulsing desire. I didn’t get hard from one kiss normally, but this was different. The chemistry between us was undeniable, explosive. It was a sexy, craving kiss, and I squeezed her waist harder. I shifted my legs, so I could bring her closer into me, feel her body fully, her breasts brushing against me.

I wanted to scoop her up and take every inch of Isabel with my tongue, and make her mine. If I licked it, it would be mine, right? And no one else could have her.

It was that thought that brought me back to my senses. I broke off the kiss and set her away from me. She fell down off her toes, dropping six inches and out of my range, thank God.

She smiled at me. “That was better than I was expecting.”

“Me too.”

“So let’s not stop.”

She reached her arms up again but I just took her by the wrists and kept her firmly a foot in front of me. “We’re not taking this any further. You know we can’t.”

I expected petulance. Maybe even pouting. She had displayed quite a bit of that in the last eighteen hours. But she just gave me a smile. It scared the living daylights out of me.

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