Page 27 of Tell Me Again
“Cocky much?” she asked and then gasped when he nipped at her.
“You talk a lot.” He turned his attention to her other breast and Sam lost the ability to speak for several minutes as he drove her crazy with his mouth. She hadn’t felt this good in forever.
And just like that, the happy bubble of lust carrying her along for this ride burst. She didn’t trust feeling good. From what Sam had learned over the years, anything that could make her feel this good and forget everything in her life, including her own damn name, was dangerous.
“You think even more than you talk,” Trevor whispered, lifting his head to look into her eyes.
“How do you—”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “Sweetheart, either your brain is going five hundred miles an hour or I’m doing something wrong. Neither is a great option, but to save my ego, I’m banking on it being your brain.”
“It’s my brain,” she admitted, shifting underneath him.
He didn’t let her go, only trailed his fingers up and down her arm, his body still pressed to hers in a way that made her want to ignore her brain. If only it were that easy.
“Tell me,” he said, nuzzling his nose into the crook of her neck.
“We never...” She broke off, swallowed, embarrassed that she was having trouble putting the words together.
“Went all the way?” he asked softly.
She gave a sharp nod.
They’d fooled around when they were younger, but Sam had the idea that she wanted to save her first time for the night of prom. It had been a silly, girlish fantasy fueled by too many teen movies, but Trevor hadn’t seemed to mind.
As it turned out, she’d been in Milan during the spring of her senior year, her high school dance only a distant thought. Not quite distant. Thoughts of the dance and Trevor going with someone else had consumed her during the long, boring hours of the photo shoot she’d been hired for.
When the shoot was done, she’d left on the makeup that made her look a decade older than eighteen and gone to the bars with the other models. It hadn’t been difficult to pick up a willing Italian man. She’d lost her virginity the night of her senior prom, just not the way she’d planned it.
“What if it’s not good now?” She murmured the words quietly, almost to herself.
“You’re kidding, right?” He lifted his head, staring into her eyes so intensely that some of her doubts were immediately burned away. “Because everything else might be a complicated mess, but this...” He motioned between the two of them. “What’s between us at this moment is bound to be amazing.”
“Why?” The question popped out before she could stop it. “If you’re expecting something based on years of me posing for the camera in matching lingerie, there’s a promise in those pictures I can’t deliver.”
She pointed to where her discarded bra lay on the wide plank floor of the office, unable to meet his gaze any longer. “I’m not the woman in the photos,” she said, letting out a soft laugh as she did. “I never was.” Maybe she was trying to repel him. As much as she wanted to feel the promise of what he offered, trusting him would only lead to disappointment. “Bryce was the one who liked sex.” She paused then added, “But you know that already.”
“This is you and me.” His voice was rough and careful, like a slow ride down a gravel road.
“That could be the problem. I haven’t done...” She waved her fingers between the two of them. “This in a while. Sex... it’s never been great for me, which always made me feel like I was doing it wrong. So I had more sex hoping to feel something, but that left me even emptier.” She tried to wiggle away but he held her steady. Time to deliver the deathblow. “For my mom, sex was about power. For Bryce, it was wanting to feel loved. For me ... it’s nothing.”
He didn’t say anything for several moments, and she waited for him to walk away. She sounded like a head case, but when she’d started her new life in Colorado she’d vowed to never again be someone she wasn’t.
He traced one finger along her jaw, gently tipping her face so she looked at him again. “I see you,” he whispered. Those three words wrecked her.
Then he added, “I want you,” and she was a goner.
“The real you is better than a thousand photographs.” He kissed her slowly, thoroughly, and her doubts once again melted away. “Any man who didn’t realize that is a complete ass,” he said against her lips, making her smile. “I know this is going to be amazing because it’s you and me, Sam.”
His voice was soft, at odds with the rough calluses that covered his palms. She loved the feel of them against her skin because they made her know they weren’t just kids fooling around anymore. Trevor had been a boy when she’d left. Bryce had tried to steal the one thing—the one person—Sam hadn’t been willing to share. But now Sam had the man. Only she had the man he’d become.
“Just the two of us,” he murmured, somehow understanding what this moment meant. It was a tiny balm to her heart to understand that it might hold the same significance to him. “Do you get that? Nothing else is in this room with us. Not the past, not the mistakes we’ve made or the ones that are bound to come moving forward. Let’s put your brain on hold and concentrate on us. Just us.”
“Just us,” she repeated and drew her fingers over the hard planes of his chest, gratified at the shudder that rippled through him. Anticipation poured through her as her body remembered what it was to be wanted by this man. How with just one look he could make all the walls around her heart crumble. It was dangerous territory and she should get out while she still could. Instead she said, “I like the sound of that. I’m long overdue for some amazing.”
He sat back then, his fingers catching in the waistband of her yoga pants. “I want all of you,” he whispered, and when she nodded, he tugged them down over her hips.
His muttered curse was the sweetest compliment she’d ever received, and she let the desire in his eyes fuel her own. She’d never felt as beautiful as she did at this moment.
