Page 59 of Branded
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
Yeah.
Seriously.
Her head shot up, nearly colliding with mine.
Luckily, I had quick reflexes and leaned out of the way, reaching up to slide her hands free of the shelf. Her skin was pale, as though the blood flow hadn’t been good, and no shit, I thought. I’d had her clinging to the shelving with her arms above her head.
Slowly, I lowered her arms, massaging the skin gently, getting the blood flow back and having the bonus of being able to touch her a little longer.
Eventually, though, she pulled back.
And I half expected her to pull back emotionally right along with physically.
Instead, though, she cupped my cheeks and kissed me deeply, breaking the kiss only after I felt like my lungs would explode.
She was breathing just as heavily when she straightened and smiled down at me. “Holy shit, Conner Smith, I should bronze you and perch you in the corner of my room as a statue of honor.”
“Would you pray naked in my honor?”
Her smile widened. “Only if you asked really, really nicely.”
I nuzzled her throat. “Oh, I’d ask nicely. I swear I would.”
Mischief in green eyes. “Kind of like you nicely told me that you wouldn’t let me come unless I shut up and held still.”
“That’s not—” Well, hell. I’d been playing, and I’d thought she’d been with me.
Fuck, what if she hadn’t been?
What if I’d pushed her?
“I like to…um…play,” I said quickly. “I thought you were…I mean…I thought you were with me.” I held her stare. “Was it too much? Should I have?—?”
Hands tilting my face up. “It was perfect,” she said. “And the only orgasm that I’ve had…” Here she seemed to lose a little steam, her cheeks going pink. “The only one I’ve had with someone who wasn’t me.” She shrugged. “In case, it…um…wasn’t clear earlier.” Her hands lifted to her face, covering up all those gorgeous features. “I”—palms dropping, green eyes on mine—“could never come with them. Though—” She cleared her throat, gaze drifting away. “I didn’t exactly do this”—a gesture between our bodies, during which she seemed to remember that she was topless, and her cheeks flushed again, her arms rising to cross over her breasts—“um, with them.”
I reached beside me, grabbing the towel that had somehow made its way to the bench and wrapping it around her shoulders, covering her breasts so that she wasn’t so exposed.
Her fingers came to the edges of the white cotton, holding it closed. “How?” she whispered. “How do you always know?”
I shrugged. “I just…I look into your eyes, and I see you.” My fingers trailed along her jaw, her skin like silk under my touch. “And I think part of it,” I said, giving her the other piece that had been bouncing around my head since the morning a few days before, since she’d helped me with the personality test, “is that when I look at you, I see myself in a way.”
Except, she was about a billion times smarter than me.
I was a brute, and she was brilliant. Beauty and the beast.
Big and loud and good at hitting shit. She was finesse and quietly competent.
We made no sense together—I knew that—but luckily for me, she seemed to feel the same connection that was pulling at me, drawing me like the opposite dipole of a magnet to her.
Her expression gentled. “I feel it, too,” she whispered. “Like when you described what you’ve had to overcome, how you’ve had to learn to live with the dyslexia and how it sometimes seems to get worse when your emotions are high. I feel that. I mean, it’s not the same. You have an actual clinical issue and mine is just…my mind getting away from me?—”
Whoa.
“Kailey.”
“My brain being weak and unable to cope?—”
