Page 25 of Your Soul to Keep

“Yeah, baby,” he murmured.

“Kiss me?”

His eyes sprang open as he tipped his head back to meet mine. “Is that a good idea?”

In answer, I pushed up onto my knees, wrapped my arms around his neck, and pressed my mouth to his.

Opening his mouth under mine, he stroked my tongue with his, groaning deep in his throat.

His hands ran down my back to grasp my hips, pulling my body up and flush with his as he lay me back onto the couch and covered me without breaking the kiss.

My breasts tingled against his hard chest, a billowing heat building rapidly inside mine. Need, shocking in its intensity, raged through me from head to toe.

I gasped, my eyes flying open as the body I had hated for so long for its bitter betrayal came alive under his hands, reconnecting to my spirit with a sharp, electric crack.

“Oh, God, Gabe!” I exclaimed, staring up into his face.

It had been years since my blood had thrummed like the ocean in my ears.

Years since I’d been willing to take any kind of risk never mind this inferno that had the power to leave me in ashes.

I nodded in answer to a question he hadn’t asked and arched my back, pressing further into him.

He dropped down, giving me more of his weight, claiming every inch of my mouth, the kiss of a man, not a boy.

My body trembled and fairly buzzed with energy underneath him. Spreading my thighs, I invited him in.

He broke the kiss and latched onto my neck, his hips rolling, before drawing back with a low groan. “Shae, baby. Not like this.”

I stared up at him, naked desire imprinted on my face.

Despite his words, he thrust his knee between my legs, his hand dropping beneath the curve of my ass, yanking me onto the hard muscle of his thigh.

Not like this?

My eyes rolled back in my head at the delicious friction.

Did he want to go to my bed? Where didn’t matter. Floor, couch, wall, anywhere would do.

I glanced around the living room briefly, the only light coming from Nan’s Tiffany lamp on the end table. It was enough. Enough to see him, assure myself it was his body wrapped around me and not a fevered, grief-stricken, dream.

I wrapped my foot around his calf and gave myself over to him, blissed-out, drunk on the feel of his solid, heavy frame in my arms, grounding me to the present.

Free of the past.

Calm in the face of an unknown future.

There was only him and me and now.

“Shae, I don’t think—”

I pulled his head down, hungrily licking the seam of his mouth.

A mouth despite my best efforts I’d never gotten out of my head.

Or my heart.

His breath left his body in a whoosh as his lips danced over mine. He nipped along the line of my jaw before dropping to sweep his mouth over the sensitive curve of my neck as his big body bowed over mine.

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