Page 28 of Clean Slade
“I don’t mind. I’m fine. Really.” I got up, but something soft that felt like cobwebs grazed my forehead and I took a clumsy step back to avoid it.
Slade attempted to catch me by putting his hand on the small of my back, but all that accomplished was dragging him down on top of me when I landed back on the couch.
I stopped breathing. I stopped moving. I goggled over Slade’s beautiful features mere inches from my face.
The cheekbones, the unshaven curly beard, the rich pink lips so close to mine. His gorgeous eyes looked more golden than brown and stared at me with so much intensity I could just about explode.
This…
This was better than any dream I’d had of him. The memory of our encounter paled compared to having him on top of me like this again.
I didn’t know how to avoid the temptation when it seemed to be calling my name so sweetly. How to stop myself from grabbing him by the back of the neck and burying my tongue deep in his mouth and seeing if his taste also lived up to the memory.
“I…um…” Why couldn’t I articulate? “There was a…spider.”
Slade lifted slightly off me, licked his bottom lip, and nodded.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You two are so funny. You look like you’re about to kiss,” Mac said.
Oh, that’s right.
Even if I wanted to succumb to him again, my daughter was right in front of us, watching.
That shook me from this daydream and landed me ass-first back in reality.
“Coffee? Coffee.” I shifted under him, and he stood.
I got busy making the coffee, and he joined me at the small counter, watching my every move like a hawk.
“You never told me.”
I froze with the sugar in my hands.
Breathe, King. Breathe. Whatever it is, you can lie about it!
“Never told you what?”
“Your age.” I almost let out a sigh of relief, but I managed to hold back.
“Oh, that. I’m thirty.”
I looked at him, waiting for a follow-up, but none came.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-one,” he answered.
He didn’t add anything further, nor did I, but I could tell just by looking at his handsome face that he was doing the math like I was.
We had been twenty-one and twenty-two when we’d had sex in the club. He had probably been an innocent man on his journey to being a big, scary SEAL, and I had gone through hell and needed the release of being with a stranger, someone who didn’t know who or what I was, someone who wasn’t scared of me or afraid of what I might do to them.
He was the last straw. I left my old life the next day. He had shown me what my life could be like as a regular anonymous.
In a way, he was the reason I was here today.
Now if I could only figure out the reason he was here with me.
