Page 88 of Branded
He ran a hand down my side, up again, slow, slow trails of a roughly calloused palm prickling against my skin, making me shiver, my spine arch, hips bunching back against his pelvis. “Hmm?” he said, continuing the slow and steady motions.
It took a long time for me to process the query, to remember what I’d even asked, what he’d said.
Mostly because I had been fucked within an inch of my life.
But I was a fighter, and I got there in the end. “What are you debating?”
That hand drifted a little lower, stroking over my abdomen. “Ah,” he murmured. “I had things planned.”
I stilled, rolled to face him. “What do you mean?” I asked, staring up into his deep brown eyes.
“I mean,” he said, “that before I saw you in that blue dress with the underwear that should be illegal”—a mock glare—“but is definitely for my eyes only?—”
“I think we’re about to test the limits of your appreciation for my sass, baby,” I quipped, raising my brows.
“Or maybe yours for mine?”
A tug of his beard. “Precisely.”
Grinning, that beard twitching, he leaned down and kissed me.
I loved that I could taste his smile on my tongue, feel it sweep through, settling into my bones. No, into my heart, as terribly cliché as that sounded. “Now,” I said, that heart pounding when we finally broke apart, but I managed to pull it together enough to remember what had started this whole conversation.
And it wasn’t my blue dress.
Or the barely-there lace I’d bought strictly for his eyes. Not that I would admit that…or that I’d nearly blushed myself into spontaneous combustion just buying them at the lingerie store. There was a reason I bought my toys online (discreet packaging anyone?) and not in person.
Not that I was ashamed.
But holy hell, having someone advise me on the recommended sexual pursuits of my vibrator had taken me about three levels beyond my comfort with that part of my life.
And…tangents.
Oh, so many tangents.
But I’d been learning that sometimes when I thought about comfort levels, a lot of the time it was my anxiety talking.
Be uncomfortable.
Be ashamed.
Be…wrong because I was wrong inside.
So maybe?—
“Would you go to a vibrator class with me?” I blurted.
Which was so along that inner tangent and not close to asking Smitty what he had been debating that had drawn me out of my orgasm haze.
But his reaction was definitely worth the blush that chased my question.
His eyes went wide. His mouth dropped open. And then he did an impersonation of a goldfish that was both adorable and seriously hilarious considering it was happening on a six-foot-plus, two-hundred-twenty-pound professional hockey player’s body.
“A what?”
I grinned, pushed him lightly so that he was on his back and I could clamber on top of him. “Not what you were debating?”
His eyes went hot. “There’d be no debating that, little bird.”
