Page 31 of So Bad It Must Be Good

Chapter Eight

Kayla had a man’s penis in her hand. Not just any man’s penis, Liam Patrick’s penis. And not because they’d been going out for a certain amount of dates or months. Just because she’d wanted to.

He was hot and hard in her palm and when she stroked, that electric blue of his eyes never once wavered from hers. The intensity there, the heat, made her breath back up in her lungs, but it didn’t make her stop.

Because she had been changed over the course of her too-long break from Gallagher’s and that old Kayla she didn’t want to recognize was gone. She had been changed in Liam’s workshop, altered in the rain.

She was blooming, and being brave, and taking something she wanted. She was throwing herself into the fire of confusion and emotion and something complicated instead of running away from all those things.

She stroked him again, watching the way his eyes seemed to turn into blue crystal, prisms of light, and she wanted that grim certainty he had lurking there, as though he knew everything about his place in the world.

But more, so much more, she wanted him. That kiss. His touch. Her body already yearned for something she’d only just experienced, and damned if she’d be too afraid to get it.

“Touch me,” she forced herself to say, and no matter that her words were a shaky, nervy whisper, or that her whole body recoiled at the thought of embarrassing herself, she’d said it.

And he did.

His mouth crushed to hers, hot and demanding, his arms around her in a tight band, trapping her arm exactly where it was—between them, fingers curled around his erection incapable of moving to stroke, but she forgot all about that as he kissed her. A kiss made of lips and tongue and teeth, a wildness she’d never experienced in herself, in someone else. There was no timidity, no question, and most of all no attempt to maneuver things any which way.

He was simply kissing her as if she was the air he needed to breathe, and she held on to him like floating debris in a stormy ocean. She felt unmoored and free, full of electricity and something . . . unnameable.

Usually no matter how long she’d been with someone, physical intimacy was nerve-wracking. She never knew quite what a guy expected of her, what he might want from her, it always felt as if there was some special secret she’d never been privy to, and she’d definitely never known how to ask for the answers.

But with Liam she didn’t feel nerves or questions. Not in this moment with his mouth desperate on hers and his arms banded around her.

His tight grip loosened, his hands sliding down her back and then she felt her shirt lifting. Since her underwear and bra had been soaked through, she’d discarded them with her other clothes. Which meant with the sweatpants gone and the shirt being lifted off her head, she was completely naked. In Liam’s kitchen. Just naked.

In some dim part of her brain she thought she should feel silly or embarrassed maybe, but he looked at her as no man had ever looked at her. As though she were some work of art, some goddess worthy of worship.

He muttered a curse, but his hands were immeasurably gentle as he cupped her face and then slid down her neck. Big and warm, that and the cool of the room causing her skin to goose bump, her nipples to pull into tight points.

But Liam kept touching her, and it warmed away any chill in the room. His rough hands molded over her body like he was a sculptor forming her into something else entirely, or she was sculpting herself, or this moment was, because she didn’t feel like herself. She felt better than she ever had.

His hands palmed her breasts and his mouth found her neck, an openmouthed kiss before his teeth scraped gently down the slope to her shoulder.

She moaned and it sounded overloud to her ears, but she hardly cared as his thumbs brushed her nipples, as he pulled her body to his and she could feel the hard length of his cock through his shorts pressing against her.

It really was a shame they didn’t have condoms. She wanted to know what it would be like to be filled and stretched by him. Would it have the same magic this moment seemed to have, or would it be the same as every other mildly entertaining sexual encounter she’d experienced?

Liam’s hands smoothed down her sides and to her hips, holding her there as he pressed himself against her, his mouth moving from her neck to the top of her breasts.

She felt like she was shuddering apart, and it was getting harder to breathe evenly. Her heart beat hard, as if she’d run a race, and then his tongue touched her nipple. She swallowed to keep from squeaking, blinking down at his dark head over her chest. She seemed to pulse in time with the flicks of his tongue.

But when he sucked her nipple deep into his mouth, the pulse was a sharp, needy pang that made her knees buckle.

He laughed against her breast—actually laughed—and she wanted to laugh too. Instead, she held on to his shoulders and righted herself, but he didn’t continue. Instead, he straightened, but as he did he linked his hands under her ass and lifted. She let out a half gasp, half laugh and looked down to see his eyes sparkling with what was sure to prove to be a very dirty mischief.

“Grab the lantern,” he ordered.

She leaned forward to grab the handle of the lantern that was on the counter behind him, one hand still clutched on his shoulder. Not that he seemed to have any problem carrying her.

His lips brushed against her collarbone as he walked, as though she weighed next to nothing, out of the kitchen and down the hall. His bristled cheek brushed against her dampened, needy nipple—whether out of accident or design—and she jolted at the amazing pop of pleasure.

“Steady,” he murmured, nudging the door to his bedroom open with his elbow.

Steady? She was vibrating with a million things, and most of them were good things. But she couldn’t manage steady or easy or even breathing that wasn’t heavy.

Liam lowered her onto the bed, taking the lantern from her grasp and placing it on to a nightstand next to the bed. Then he was over her, so tall and broad and . . .

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