Page 94 of Take Me Home

“Every Friday, you come in wearing these hot teacher skirts.” He pushed the skirt up another inch, drawing his thumbs up the insides of her thighs. Her eyelids fluttered, and she swayed, had to steady herself on his shoulder.

“And your hair all twisted up off your neck. And those fucking glasses.”

“They’re fake,” she confessed, a wolfish gleam in her eyes as she peered down at him, watching to see what he would do next.

He pushed her skirt up to her waist and traced the lower hemline of her underwear with his knuckle. Not breaking eye contact, he swept one thumb across the damp center of the cotton. Hazel sucked in a sharp breath. Her nails dug into hisshoulder, sending the hairs at the back of his neck to attention. When he withdrew the contact to skate his palms back down her thighs, her hips stuttered forward.

“Doesn’t matter.” He barely even knew what he was talking about anymore, mesmerized by the feel of her. How was her skin this soft and warm? “They’re hot. Everything about you is so fucking hot.”

He pressed a kiss to one inner thigh, then the other, nudging gently for her to step her feet further apart. Then he hooked one finger inside her underwear, tugging it to the side just as his other hand squeezed the smooth, full swell of her ass and drew her forward to his mouth.

Chapter

Twenty-Two

Ash’s mouth should have come with a warning. Hazel hadn’t had a lot to compare it to, since her limited hookups tended to skip this part entirely, but he had clearly tacked a specialty in oral onto his architecture studies. This was graduate-level work.

When he admitted he’d thought about this, pushing up herhot teacher skirt, she figured the fantasy would have gone somewhere more satisfying for him. This was all for her, wasn’t it?Herpleasure? He’d gone down on her yesterday in the barn, too, had only stopped when she demanded he come back up, let her get her hands on him. She didn’t quite know what to do with herself when all his attention was on her.

She reveled in the scratch of his stubble, the shape of him kneeling before her, the breadth of his shoulders, dark curls falling across his forehead, until she caught sight of them in the mirror above his dresser. And…Oh. She thought the view of him from above was a lot.Thisperspective made her lips part on a gasp.

After he’d roughly pulled her to his face, he’d hitched one of her knees over his shoulder, and she’d complied so quickly, she hadn’t had time to consider how intimate this position was. Now, she was looking at herself, half climbing him, hips angled desperately toward the exquisite warmth and pressure of his mouth, her skirt up around her ribs. She was clutching his hair, his freeshoulder for support. His hands worked in tandem with his mouth, one working into her while his other hand squeezed her ass cheek. She watched herself writhe against his face and—

It was enough to break through the haze of her lust, make her unhook her knee from his shoulder. He looked up at her questioningly, and she fought the urge to cover her face. “Too much?” he asked roughly, turning to kiss her thigh.

Not physically. Physically, it had been so good. Already, she’d felt the swelling ache and pressure of an orgasm building. But something else had come with it, a frantic, needy clawing in her chest. Her skin pricked with a feeling of overexposure.

“Tell me.” His voice was gruff but not impatient.

His eyes flicked to her hand, which she’d drawn up to her collarbone, as if she could calm the internal clawing there. His awareness of her hand made the clawing worse, made it push up into her throat, a thick knot of emotion. God, where was this coming from? Her nose and eyes stung with the threat of tears—again—and she went to push her skirt down.

Immediately, Ash rose. He reached first for her face but seemed to second-guess touching her there and swept his palms down her arms, cupping her elbows. That wild, hungry, half-drunk look in his eyes vanished, replaced by sober concern. “Talk to me.”

“Sorry, I don’t know why—”

“Don’t apologize. Just tell me what’s going on.”

He waited, but she didn’t know how to explain something that she hadn’t yet worked out for herself. She’d stopped him in the barn yesterday, too, when she’d beenso close, when she’d needed him to come with her.

“We don’t have to do this tonight,” he said. “We can watch a movie or—”

“No.” She wanted this, wanted him. There was just somethingmalfunctioning inside her, some faulty wiring that had never been up to code but had kept the lights on until now, until someone opened the wall and took a good look at the shoddy work in there.

He waited, and she swallowed down the blockage in her throat. How could she explain to him that his adoration made her feel like she was coming apart at the seams?

“I don’t know how to let you…” She gestured between him and herself. “I’m not used to this.” She was being entirely too vague, practically saying nothing at all. She didn’t want to admit that sex, as rarely as she had it, was just another escape for her. She just closed her eyes and chased her release, and while she didn’t jump into bed with just anyone, she didn’t need an emotional attachment. In fact, the attachment she felt for Ash seemed to be precisely the thing making this harder.

“You’re not used to someone taking care of you,” he said.

This must have been true, too, because the sting of unshed tears sharpened.

Ash ran his hands back up her arms to cradle her face. “You need to know you’re not in this deeper than I am? Not more out of control?”

She shook her head. She shouldn’t need the upper hand. That wasn’t how relationships were supposed to work.

“You know how good you were feeling before we stopped just now?”

Her cheeks heated, but she couldn’t deny it.

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