Page 93 of The Harmless Series

He is comfort and passion, the brush of bunched-up cotton from his shirt tickling my navel. My hands become bold, reaching for the hot skin at his waist band, fingertips tentative but in control. I want to touch him. I want to feel his hardness. I want to wrap my hand around his shaft and give him pleasure.

I want to take, too, because there is power in holding a man by his center. There is power and goodness and a purity to it all.

Maybe I can be pure again by being naked with Drew. By letting him make love to me.

Perhaps that’s what this is.

A cleansing ritual.

A baptism.

I reach down and touch the outline of his erection through his pants, cupping my pal, letting my fingers gently touch the tip. His groan is almost a growl, the sound fiery and masculine.

It makes me feel good.

It makes me feel alive.

“Look, I know you haven’t been intimate with anyone for four years,” he says softly. His arms go tense. “At least, I assume that’s true.”

“It is.”

He nods. “I don’t need anything you can’t give.”

I begin to tremble.

“See? You’re shaking. Maybe this is too much.” He moves his elbow and slides his hip along the bed cover, the weight change rolling me slightly closer to him.

“I’m shaking because it’s hard to restrain myself.”

“Oh?” His voice is so low. Low and smoky and full of deep, dark promises. Promises that whisper to the longing in me.

“I don’t know how I’m going to respond. I might freeze. I might cry. Scratch that – I’m definitely going to cry at least once. And quit looking at me like that,” I chide, sticking a finger in his face.

He bites it. Oh, God, that warm, wet mouth on my finger.

I pull it back and laugh in spite of myself. “I want to trust you.”

“You can trust me, Lindsay.”

“How do you know you can trust me?”

His eyebrows go up, and in the strange moonlight he looks like a man from the 1940s, all greys and shadows, smoke and mirrors. The room seems huge and tiny at the same time, all the color gone, replaced by the intensity of us.

Just us.

Nothing else is real.

“Because you’re the same woman I knew four years ago, even if you’ve changed. What’s underneath is the same. The outside,” he says with an appreciative, almost wolfish, grin, “is most definitely still fine. Possibly even better.”

I squirm, embarrassed yet pleased by his words. He smells so good, his bare arms radiating musk and sweat. He’s so warm, so close, and I lose myself in the simple act of breathing him in.

“But more than anything, I trust you because I don’t have a choice.”

“Everyone has a choice,” I say automatically, like a robot. It was one of Stacia’s favorite catchphrases at the Island.

“Not when it comes to you. I’m a goner.”

And then we stop talking.

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