Kelsey dragged her gaze up off her hand to the blazing blue eyes locked on…her lips? Instinctively, her tongue flicked out to lick them.
“I can’t stop being a part of my friends’ lives, especially if I’m an ocean away. Keeping up online is the only way. They’re important to me.”
“You can look, stay up-to-date. You just can’t post yourself.”
Sighing, she moved on to the next big problem he and Christian had presented. “I can’t stop working.”
Elias started to laugh. Probably thought better of it once he caught a whiff of the stink-eye she was aiming his way. “Believe me when I say you will work, in a…different way. A change of careers.”
He wasn’t getting her point. “Manhattan was going to be my own personal movie. I wanted to watch a world of adventures unfolding in front of me. Like unlimited cable channels—I’d get to choose what to watch, when, on my own terms. Now? Nothing’s on my own terms.”
He stilled, with an intense glower around his eyes, as if holding an internal battle with himself. After a quick shake of his head, those blue eyes cleared. Putting one arm behind her on the edge of the couch, Elias leaned over. Sort of hovered right in front of her face, while that steel wall of his chest pressed along her arm. “There’s one thing that can be on your own terms.”
“What?”
“Me.” Then he stayed there, only touching the edges of her. Along her upper back, arm, and thigh. He was so close that gravity should’ve done its thing and nudged him the final few centimeters.
Oh. But that was the gift Elias had given her. No need to wait for gravity. No need to wait for him to soldier past his list of responsibilities and reasons why they shouldn’t kiss. It was all on her terms.
So Kelsey accepted the gift. She lifted her chin just a bit. That was all it took to have her lips make contact with his. Just a touch, a brush. It was the green light Elias had evidently been waiting for.
He rounded his shoulders to cage her in with his other arm. But was it really a cage when it was precisely where Kelsey wanted to be at this moment? In fact, this was the most free she’d felt in days.
And she was suddenly glad she’d brushed her teeth while waiting for Anya to riffle through Genevieve’s workout gear for her.
Elias kissed her. His lips worked across hers, kneading and pressing and sending little flares of heat into the center of her body with every single change in pressure. He was slow, steady, methodical in his approach to varying softness and firmness, speed and finesse. It wasn’t just as good as the last time.
It was better.
Better because he—or gravity, finally having shown up to the party—was slowly pushing her over sideways. As soon as her head hit that flowered cushion, Elias covered the rest of her body with his. Heat and weight everywhere, a million times better than the coziness of being under the warmth and heaviness of a down comforter topped by three afghans during a blizzard.
His heat radiated through the thin material of his dress slacks onto her bare legs, through his shirt to her belly and breasts. Even through the buzz cut of his short hair as she ran her nails through it. And all of that was nothing compared to the heat at her core.
Elias teased her lips apart. She was no dummy. Kelsey parted them and immediately tangled her tongue with his. It was a dance, really. A twining, swirling dance first in her mouth, then in his, to the point where she lost track of whose was whose.
It was fantastic.
He broke off the kiss and raised up on his elbows. “You’re so beautiful, Kelsey. And you look so delicate, fragile even. Until you kiss me back with such fierce passion that I can hardly restrain myself.”
Something about the way his speech patterns—which were the only clue that English wasn’t his first language, aside from the lilting hint of an accent—tended toward the formal struck her as unutterably sexy. Maybe it was a naughty professor fantasy she’d never realized lurked in her subconscious? When he spoke to her in those longer, almost old-fashioned sentences, it just curled her toes.
“Don’t.”
That popped him from his forearms up to his hands, practically planking above her as he lifted his body. “Don’t kiss you?”
“Omigosh, not that at all. Don’t restrain yourself.” More sure of herself now—or more sure that Elias and his strict adherence to rules wouldn’t hold her at bay—Kelsey curled her legs around his calves to pull him back down. Then that felt so good that she kept going, wrapping them tight just below his ass.
Then she undulated, half to drive Elias crazy, half because she simply couldn’t stop her hips from moving against his. Not when it rubbed her against a very long, very hard bulge in his pants.
One that she now craved to see out of his pants.
The movement spurred Elias back into action, his momentary hesitation gone. He buried his face against her neck, biting and licking and sucking his way from the hollow below hear ear, across where her racing pulse beat frantically against her skin, down to the hollowed notch in the center of her collarbone.
God, she loved how methodical he was.
Elias surged back up, taking her mouth once more. More…recklessly. A little rougher, a little less polished. More…urgent. Lips more insistent, tongue more persistent. Somehow, he made her shiver and flush with heat at the same time.
A man who could tweak the laws of science with his kisses was a good man, indeed.
It was so quiet in the summerhouse that their increasingly harsh pants were louder even than the tree branches the wind tapped against the glass panes. That made it all more real. That there wasn’t a pulsing techno soundtrack to distract, or even the sharp symphony of taxi horns she’d fallen in love with in her two days in Manhattan.
There was only their breath. The proof of their mutual arousal.
It was exactly what Kelsey needed as an antidote to the morning.
His big, facile hands circled the bare skin above the waist of her shorts. But shoving her sports tank up only gave him access to the tight band of the built-in bra. And by tight, she meant locked down tighter than San Quentin during a riot. Kelsey could swear she came close to dislocating a shoulder at least once a month while fighting to remove her sports bra.
Clearly, he knew not to fight a losing battle. Instead, he rasped his thumbnail across her taut nipple, poking hard against the tight spandex. It wasn’t his mouth on her, which Kelsey longed for. But omigod, it made every nerve ending squeal in delight, especially when he squeezed and pinched the other one, too. Twin bolts of bliss arrowed from her breasts to the hot, needy ache between her thighs.
“I want you, Kelsey,” he said in a gravelly, thick voice. “I want to have you. All of you. Naked beneath me, on top of me, surrounding me.”