When had she frayed it down to nothing?
I was around for all of it, every interaction, and I’d hardly noticed her severing each individual strand.
Her soft footsteps padded toward the kitchen when she inhaled sharply.
“Noah,” she whispered. “I didn’t see you at first.”
I dropped my chin to my chest and breathed deeply. “Sorry.”
Go back to bed, go back to bed, go back to bed, I wished feverishly in my head. I couldn’t turn. I couldn’t look at her. Not even for a second.
My whole body tensed as the sound of her bare feet came closer.
“I-I couldn’t fall asleep.”
What strange intimacy was created in moments like that one. Something about a dark room and whispers. Knowing that no one could see us, knowing that she had already stripped herself of the confines of the day, ratcheted that tension coursing through my body higher and higher, something bright and fierce.
My eyes were pinched closed so tightly as she stopped next to me that I saw bursts of white behind my eyelids.
I probably looked ridiculous.
“Don’t you want to know why?” she whispered. “I could hardly sit still wondering if you were out here, if you were alone.”
“Molly,” I begged. I didn’t even know what I was begging for.
Touch me.
Don’t touch me.
Give me permission to do this thing.
Lock the door on your bedroom so I’m not tempted to splinter it to shreds for getting between us.
“Look at me,” she begged right back.
Slowly, I peeled open my eyelids and looked down at her. Her face was bare, and her hair, that glorious hair that I loved so much, was in messy tumbles around her bare shoulders. Bare, save for thin straps of a white tank top. Her legs, bare, save for impossibly small white and pink shorts.
She wasn’t wearing a bra.
My lungs, they’d stopped working properly at the sight of her.
“Doesn’t it feel like …” She stopped to lick her lips. “Like this is inevitable?”
“What?” I rasped. She was so beautiful in the dim light that my vocal cords stopped working too. I wanted to devour her.
“You and me,” she answered quietly. Her eyes were huge in her face, and they searched mine so deeply that I felt it in the slow turn of my heart. “Even if it’s just … here.”
I blinked. “Here?”
She laughed quietly. “This may be the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, but I was tossing and turning in that bed, trying to figure out a way to make this make sense in my head. You and me, thrown together like this. And now, in this place that’s so far removed from every complication. I can’t stop thinking about that kiss, Noah, and whenever you look at me, I know you can’t either. I don’t see how it’s possible to leave it at just that. Not with how good it was.”
My hand lifted slowly, and I slid it against the silky skin of her neck, allowing my fingers to tangle in her hair as I cupped the back of her slender neck.
“What are you saying, Molly?”
Molly lifted her chin and hit me with the full force of her gaze, the full force of whatever decision she’d come to before she walked out the door.
“I want you to come back to that bedroom with me. I want us to have these two nights, to get whatever this thing is between us out of our system. I feel like … like we pushed a wheel into motion ten years ago, and we need this to make it stop.”
If I’d grabbed the frayed edge of a live wire, it wouldn’t have had as powerful of an effect on me. My whole body shuddered from the force of it.
“These two nights,” I repeated.
She nodded slowly. “What happens in South Dakota, stays in South Dakota.”
That she could make me smile at that moment should have terrified me, but it didn’t. It felt right. And as she’d said, it felt inevitable.
Molly tilted her chin, inviting my kiss, but I shook my head. My thumb pulled at the generous curve of her lower lip.
“If I kiss you here, I won’t be able to stop long enough to move to that bed, and if I get an entire night with you …” I dropped my forehead against hers and took a shuddering breath. “Then I need room to work.”
Molly whimpered.
It was the last shred unraveling, the final cord splitting with an audible snap.
Slowly, leisurely, with a measure of control that I did not know I had left, I slid my hand down her shoulder, her arm, her wrist, and wove my fingers through hers. Then I led her back to the bedroom.
MOLLY
Everything took on a filmy, hazy, decadent quality when the door clicked shut behind me. Like someone changed the filter through which I saw everything, and it shut my brain off in the same motion. My hands didn’t even seem like they belonged to me when I pivoted and pushed Noah up against the door.
His expression was forbidding at the move, and I shivered.
“Take your shirt off,” I ordered.
He jerked up his chin. “You first.”
There was a moment when we both froze like that, unwilling to give up control to the other person. Then we collided. His mouth took mine, rough and hard and deep. His hands boosted underneath my ass, and I wrapped my legs around his waist.
Lips and teeth and tongue, slick and slippery and messy. I’d been waiting for this, I thought, since the moment I saw him in the elevator. Waiting for the strength of his body against mine, overpowering me in the best possible way.
He tasted minty and cool, and his tongue twined around mine as his fingers dug into my flesh until it hurt.
This wasn’t sweet, and it wasn’t slow as I tugged at his shirt.
I wanted my hands on him, now that I’d given myself permission for this. Nothing short of that would suffice until we were both gasping and spent and sweaty in the middle of that exceptionally large bed. He tossed me back onto it, and I bounced with a laugh.
But my laughter died at the look on his face.
This was a man pushed to the edge of his sanity. By me.
I’d done this to him, and it sent such a wet, hot rush of power through my body. Something overtook me at that realization, and I sat up on my knees as he ripped his shirt off and threw it onto the floor. My shirt went with it, and his eyes darkened even further as I laid back and started pushing my shorts down in slow, rolling movements of my hips.
“Stop,” he growled.
My hands froze. One finger played idly with the elastic edge.
Noah shoved his shorts down, his boxer briefs with them, and I licked my lips at the sight of his glorious, glorious nakedness.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.