“Do you think that it also applies to kissing?” He leaned in and kissed me lightly on each cheek, then on my lips.
My eyes fluttered closed. A rush of warmth surged through me, chasing away the nervousness. “You know, it might not.”
“Well,” he said, smoothing his lips across my jaw, “I have a proposal.”
“I’m listening,” I said, holding back a sigh.
“I kiss you. Everywhere. Starting with your gorgeous face.” He moved his mouth to the underside of my jaw, and flicked a tongue out there.
I whimpered.
“You tell me when it’s too much. When you’re stressed, when you’re panicked, when you feel ugly. And I will stop, and we’ll find something we like on TV, and we’ll try again next time.”
He came back up to brush his lips against mine. “Next time,” I murmured. “Okay.” This guy was promising a next time, despite all my freaky freaking out. Just one thought reverberated through my mind at this moment: I love you. I tamped it down just as quickly as it came up. I didn’t love him. I loved the way he was treating me. He was treating me better than I did myself.
And I really loved the way he held my face between his palms, like I was the most desirable thing he’d ever seen.
My fingers drifted to the two sticks holding whatever was left of my updo in place as Nate kissed me, full and slow. I smiled against his lips as my thick waves tumbled down over my shoulders. I almost protested when his lips left mine, but when they moved down my neck, leaving a sweet, damp trail, I let my head fall back and my eyes close.
“Perfect,” he murmured into the hollow of my throat, just before using his perfect hands to brush my hair from my right collarbone. He kissed every inch of it, and when he reached the strap of my tank, tucked his fingers beneath it, sat up and looked into my eyes. “Okay?”
I drew in a slow breath, and nodded. He treated every bit of skin he moved the strap across to one slow kiss, and when it finally fell down past my shoulder, flicked his tongue out against the skin there. “I don’t know if you understand how perfect this line is. I spent so long trying to get it right with charcoal and paper. It’s like a frame for the rest of your body.”
The way he said the word “body,” deep and wanting in the back of his throat, sent my hands grabbing at his back, pulling him closer. He smiled as he traced his way back over my collarbone, brushing gentle kisses over the other side as well before coming back to my mouth, licking into it like it was where he was dying to be all along. He pulled back and tucked my hair behind my ears before running his hands down to my ribs again. The feel of his fingers splayed out on my sides was almost too much, in the best way possible. “Are you doing okay?”
I nodded. I couldn’t get words out if I tried.
“How do you feel?”
“Like you want me.”
“Mmm,” he said, brushing his lips at the corner of my mouth. “That’s not the answer I was looking for.” Slowly, torturously, his thumbs brushed up against my breasts. He looked at me, his eyebrows up. I nodded, fast. His hands slid down to the hem of my shirt, lifting the safe elastic band holding it in place. The same look again, testing, asking with every step whether it was all right.
The familiar pressure built in my chest, but I wouldn’t let it take over now. No way was my shitty body image going to ruin this. My voice was shaky as I smiled. “Yeah. But can I lie down? Get under the covers?”
He tugged the blanket from under me, and in one smooth motion, eased my body down the mattress with one arm and tugged it over me with the other. “Thank you,” I whispered, and then his hands were under my shirt and against my bare skin, tugging the whole thing, including the built-in bra, off over my head.
The blanket stretched up over one side of me, and his body framed the other, and with the way his hand gripped my side, I felt solid, safe. Protected.
“Your neck, your shoulders, are the frame.” He reached up and traced them, again, with his fingers. “And this is the art.” His fingers traced down the side of my breasts, then trailed down my stomach. Lying down, it looked full, but relatively flat, softly curving down into hips. His palms covered my midsection, and he looked down hungrily as they moved to my sides, gripping them. “And this is where the frame ends. Absolutely gorgeous.”
His lips brushed down my breastbone. “This is what a woman looks like. This is what made the masters so hungry to paint. They all knew better than the dumbass fashion magazines, Cat. Trust me. It’s amazing how so many curves can all come together into something so absolutely visually perfect.”
There that word was, again. Perfect. In application to me. Not only me, but my body.
He moved to my right, his body half-covering mine. I’d be damned if he wasn’t all muscle. The solid warmth of his chest pressed into mine, making my breasts round and high. He covered the top curve of the right one with soft, fluttering kisses, then stopped. The breath caught in my throat and he pulled away, looking up at me again.
“Stop?” he asked.
“Please don’t,” I managed.
“Oh, thank God,” he growled, lowering his lips to my breast again, tracing its outer edge with his tongue, devouring the surface with wide open kisses, and finally sucking my nipple deep into his mouth. I arched my back and moaned. He moved to the other side and did the same, finally kissing back up to my throat, and covering my entire torso with his.
We kissed again for what could have been minutes and what could have been hours. All I knew was that I was completely lost with memorizing the taste of him, the feel of his tongue against mine, the sensation of any guy being this careful and slow with me.
Sleeping with asshole Jake had never been anything like this.
He pulled back and let his hand cup the side of my face, brushing my eyebrow with his thumb and gazing at me. “Still okay?”
I shook my head no.
He nodded quickly, then pushed himself up and away from me. I caught his wrist before his hand left my hip. “No,” I said aloud. “Would you...can I...could you take your shirt off? I want to see you too.”
That was the understatement of the century.
A mischievous smile curled his lips, and he nodded, sitting back on his heels.
He reached for the bottom of his shirt with one hand, grabbing at it and tugging upwards.
Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, sweet Lord in heaven. He was actually listening to me, to some words that had tumbled out of my mouth and into the air and now floated around my head in a halo that begged for all of him to press against all of me, all at once. Because what I was seeing now absolutely positively could never be unseen.
Abs. Everywhere. Two gorgeous columns of muscle stacked above his navel. Pecs that begged to be bitten. Preferably while his hands squeezed my ass.
Stomach rolls be damned. I couldn’t stand another second of that body being uncovered and my mouth not being on it. I sat up and snaked my hands under his arms and grabbed at his shoulders, sucking at his neck and moving down to his chest. My tongue flicked out against it and oh my God, he tasted incredible. Clean, slightly sweet, with a musky smell and a trace of salt.
He moved his hand to my back and eased me down on the bed again, returning his mouth to mine. After a few seconds, I drew back just enough to murmur “thank you” into his mouth.
Before I knew it, he had pushed away again, then lowered his body even further, kissing quickly down between my breasts and over my ribs. With his gorgeous arms propping him up on elbows at either side of my hips, his breath tickled my stomach, his lips poised just over my belly button.
With how hard he felt, twitching against my knee, I couldn’t believe he asked again. But he did. “Okay?” It was a low, rumbling whisper now. Like he would die if I said no.
“God, yes,” I groaned, and then his mouth was everywhere, his tongue flicking into my navel and down across my hip bones. They didn’t jut out sharply like they used to—now they were shadow within a curve, a soft corner marking where one thing en
ded and another began. Just like Nate had said.
His hands pushed my pants down my thighs and my head spun. I fought the instinct to squeeze him between my legs, flip him down on the bed, and tear his pants off. I wanted to, so badly, but I was also enjoying this way too much.
I lifted the blanket and looked down, mostly so I could watch his shoulders flex while his hands gripped my skin. I wasn’t worried about his fingers digging into my fat anymore. I barely even noticed, because I was so focused on wanting more of his body against more of mine. And the way his palms pressed against me, like my curves were only helping him grab onto me, move me where he wanted me to go—I could have written my own ass a love letter right then and there.
Nate’s tongue and lips were intoxicating, but when he squeezed my hip and let his teeth graze across the skin there, I almost lost it. I arched my back again and moaned.
He looked up at me, eyebrows raised. Asking permission.
“Don’t stop,” I gasped. He returned his lips to my body, moving down my leg.
“I have to tell you,” he murmured between kisses, his voice rumbling deep in his chest. “Since the moment I watched your shirt come off in that class, I’ve only been able to think of one thing.” He kissed all the way down to my knee. “How absolutely delicious you looked. How gorgeous your skin was.” His hand caressed my calf, brushing against the sole of my foot, and a shiver ran through me. He leaned forward, pressing one hand into the bed next to my head. He kissed me again, fully, his tongue dipping between my teeth for the briefest moment, then broke away. “How badly I wanted to taste you.”
I drew my leg up so that my foot was flat on the mattress. His hand played against the scar at the front of my shin, and I made a face. “I hate that thing.”
He sat up, stroked the back of my calf, and lifted my leg to his mouth, kissing it gently. “Stop that. It’s one of my favorite things. It shows me how strong you are.” His hand brushed up along the outside of my thigh. “And I know it’s responsible for this gorgeous body of yours.”
Which I also hated. Until Nate looked at it and worshiped it like it was an actual masterpiece. Until he showed me how strong I could be. Now it didn’t seem so bad, not at all.
He lowered himself down over me again, kissing me and smiling. “I didn’t think you’d let me kiss you this much.” His hand gripped my waist again, and the only sound I could get out was “Mmmm.”
He moved lower again, his fingers playing a slow piano tune down my stomach, over my hips, and then between my legs.
The sensation of those fingers moving over my most sensitive area shot through me, forcing my head back, exposing my neck to his nibbles and licks. He didn’t have to ask, but he did.
“Okay?”
It was the definition of okay. Unfortunately, I didn’t have one syllable of all the words I needed, so I just gasped and nodded, and then he lowered down again. My legs fell to the sides, looking long and strong and actually kind of pretty. His hands reached under my ass and his lips showered soft, worshipful attention on the very spot that ached for it most. Finally, his tongue pushed inside me, and the incredible warmth and restlessness and need of it all was almost too much to bear, until suddenly it was too much to bear, and the orgasm ripped through my body in hot, lingering waves.
I laid back, gasping. “God, Nate.”
He settled back down beside me, kissing my cheekbones, the angle of my jaw, the skin behind my ear. He pressed his lips up against it and his hot breath swirled through my hair. “Mission accomplished. I thought it would take me way longer than that.”
I turned and lazily kissed his forehead. “To what? Taste me?” I couldn’t believe the words were coming out of my mouth. I’d never talked about my own body explicitly—never even thought about it that way. Even with Jake. Especially with Jake.
“To let me kiss you everywhere.” He winked, and the slightest hint of a dimple flashed in his cheek.
I thought I would die. “Oh, I’m sure there are more places you could kiss me. And I’ll let you, next time. But right now, there is something I want.”
My fingers pushed under the waistband of his pants, and wasted no time drifting to the front. Yeah, he definitely wanted me as badly as I wanted him.
He closed his eyes and rolled to his back, pushing his pants down and giving me a full view. The hard cut of his abs continued in a solid path down past his hips, the firm lines of his thighs framing his own complete and total hard-as-a-rock, standing-at-attention gorgeousness.
“You have to be kidding me,” I said. “You are human, right? How is it possible that your body is this perfect?”
My hands were like a magnet to his skin, and they set to work tracing every hard bit of it, my fingers dancing along his length and flicking at the head. A strangled moan escaped his throat, and I grinned like a fool.
“Do you have something?” I asked. “I’m on the pill, but...”
He licked his lips, swallowed hard, and nodded. He pulled a small square box from his nightstand and ripped the cardboard strip off of it. An unopened box, and just a three-pack at that. A just-in-case box, not an I-do-this-all-the-time box. I ticked my eyebrow up and smirked in satisfaction. A guy this hot, and I was the one girl, it seemed, he had brought home.
It was my turn for my hands to grab at his hips, for my arms to pull his body to my mouth. My lips covered the place where his shoulder met his neck, and I sucked hard. He groaned, settled between my legs and rocked into me, reaching up to brush the hair away from my face and resting his forehead against mine.
My world exploded into swirling color and heavy breaths and nothingness as my skin drank in every bit of his.
Chapter 10
Afterwards, we laid facing each other, our shoulders pressed together as my fingers trailed down the paths carved by muscle his back. His hand rested on the back of my hip which, freed from fabric and weird sitting positions, curved down into my waist without a single roll.
I was happy.
“I like this,” I murmured.
“Being here with me?”
I kissed him lazily. “That too. But...I don’t know. Lying here, like this, I feel like a
model.”
“What does that even mean, when you say that?”
“Well, when I would do a photo shoot, the clothes would just look absolutely incredible on me. They’d be loose, even. I wore some things that I still drool over. They were masterpieces.”
“Fashion design major. Got it,” he nodded.
“Right. My body made these clothes everything they were supposed to be. It was this tremendous feeling of power, you know? That these clothes were designed with such care, such attention to detail, but my body was the only thing that could make them into everything the artist imagined.”
“How much did you weigh?” Nate asked as his hand grazed the back of my thigh and played at the back of my knee.
“I was at one-twenty, and I think it was only that much because I’ve always had these shoulders and arms.”
“You mean, the beautifully toned ones?”
I blushed. “I always thought I was a better rider when my upper body was strong—that I’d be able to handle the barrels and the jumps better. Guess that wasn’t quite true. Anyway, that was why so many of the designers asked for me. I was unique as a subset of their definition of perfect. And now....”
“....Now you’re my entire definition of perfect.”
That earned him a long, lingering kiss, complete with a little fingernail running across his back.
When I finally stopped, his low sound of satisfaction lingered in my ears.
“What’s your story?” I asked him. “I mean, you’re telling me I’m perfect, but the other night...”
“Oh, God. Cat. I’m really sorry about that. I mean, I’m not sorry, but...”
My brow furrowed and my eyes narrowed. “What?”
“Okay. So you know how I was at USC for the past two years?”
“Yeah.”
<
br /> “Well, I didn’t tell you the whole reason why I left.” His eyes darted away, focusing on his own hand as it moved over the sheet and rested on my hip. “When I was there...I didn’t like myself very much. I did that bodybuilding thing I told you about, which is why I actually feel a little self-conscious right now.”
“Okay, I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true. I used to be in a lot better shape than this. But anyway, I got involved in some stuff I wasn’t proud of. Some of it was really bad. And some of it was just sort of bad.”
“Like?”
He sighed. “Oh, just….partying, I guess. I didn’t party a lot, which is why when I did party, I partied hard. And I ended up in bed with too many girls that I didn’t remember getting there with, you know?”
My eyes flew open and my eyebrows pushed up.
“No, no,” he said. “No. I’m clean. Tested and everything. I swear. But the last time...I mean, I didn’t even remember meeting the girl, you know? And it was just the worst feeling.”
“Okay,” I murmured, tracing his pecs with my finger. “So? What does that have to do with me?”
“God, Cat, that night I met you was just overwhelming. You were so gorgeous, I could barely think straight. And then realizing who you were… I mean, I’ve never forgotten what you did for me at Camp Eagle.”
I giggled. “Little-kid egos, for the win.”
“No, but really. The teasing could have gotten really bad, could have really fucked me up. You saved me that summer. I kissed the hottest girl at camp, and it got me major street cred.”
I gave a closed-lip laugh and nestled my head into his shoulder. Jesus, the smell of his aftershave was enough to make me want to jump on him again right then and there.
“And your face, it’s more gorgeous now, obviously, but really just the same. You’ve always been the perfect woman, to me. ”
“Oh, stop,” I said, kissing his neck. But I didn’t want him to stop.
“So, only realizing who you were after I saw you in that class and wanted to lick every inch of you, and then the beer, and the dancing, and....well, to make a long story short, I didn’t know which way was up, you know? And you’d been crying after the class, and you’d had some beer too.”
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