Her face softened again, and she reached out with one pale hand. She gripped his arm with a strength that surprised him.
“I don’t have any regrets besides the fact that we didn’t start doing that years ago.”
Those green eyes were so earnest he could have fallen in and drowned.
“Are you sure?” His voice sounded shaky to his own ears. He hated the gnawing need he had for her. Hated the knowledge that it wasn’t enough just to share his body with her. He’d served up his fucking heart to her.
Remi rose and put her mug down on the small table between the chairs. With one step, she was standing in front of him and then climbing into his lap.
He nearly hurled his coffee to the floor to get his hands on her as she straddled him.
When her arms came around his neck, when her body settled against his chest, he let out a breath and wrapped her into his arms. Content to sit here in this chair with her and rock for the rest of his life.
“I have to tell you something,” she whispered against his neck.
He squeezed her tighter. Something was about to change.
When she said whatever she had to say, they wouldn’t be able to go back to before. To now. He wasn’t prepared for that. Hell, he wasn’t prepared for what had happened between them mere hours ago. Their lives had changed. At least his had. His course altered. And there was no going back.
“Go ahead, baby,” he said, sinking his fingers into her hair and holding her face against him.
She took a shuddery breath.
“I have to work my way up to it.”
Fuck.
“Okay.”
She pulled back to look at him. That sad smile was still there, and he wanted to kiss it away.
“Do you want to talk about what we did tonight?” she asked.
His cock stirred against her as the memories etched permanently into his brain flickered through his thoughts. She’d let him do so many things to her.
“Do you?” he hedged.
This time her lips spread into a grin as a flush tinged her cheeks pink. “I liked it. A lot. Wait, that’s not true.”
He stiffened again. Fearful that this was the moment it all came crashing down.
“I loved it.” She framed his face in her hands and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Chaste and sweet. A reward. A gold fucking star for treating her like a plaything.
“You can’t be real,” he whispered.
“I kept wondering if I was born like this. Or if it was for you. Did I sense it in you, and I wanted to be what you wanted?”
“Remi.” He closed his eyes as his erection began to throb. It was not the time for an encore. She had things to tell him. He needed reassurances. Neither of them would get what they needed if he slid his dick into her.
She shifted against him and bit her lower lip. Fuck.
He gripped her hips and held her still. “No distractions.”
“You have to admit, doing more of that would be more fun than talking,” she said, rocking against him again.
He growled, fingers finding their way under the hem of her sweatshirt to grip her ass. She was wearing some kind of silky underwear that made his fingers feel even rougher by comparison. Unable to stop himself, he gave her a quick, hard upward thrust. Then another.
“Brick.” She leaned into him, drawing her lips to his and stealing the oxygen from his lungs.
“Baby,” he breathed. Fingers digging into the soft curves of her ass. “Stop.”
“I’d rather do this than talk,” she said, raising up on her knees only to grind down against his aching arousal.
He fisted one hand in the hem of her sweatshirt, holding it against her back and gave her ass a stinging slap with his other. Her intake of breath was sharp. Seeing her eyes go wide and glassy with arousal didn’t help his predicament. He wanted more. Wanted to do more. Taste more. Wanted to memorize the sound his hand made when it connected with her.
“Talk,” he ordered gruffly.
She pouted prettily, and his dick reacted accordingly.
“How can you want to talk when your erection is trying to tunnel its way into me right now?”
On a groan, he stood and dropped her in the chair she’d originally occupied. “Stay. Talk,” he said, sitting back down.
“Geez. Someone might lose an eye around that thing,” she said, admiring how his stupid dick strained against its confines.
He sat down again and picked up his forgotten coffee to take a sip.
“Well, that little slap on my ass goes pretty far in reassuring me,” she said.
He choked as he tried to swallow and inhale at the same time. “Reassuring you about what?” he asked, mopping coffee out of his beard. It was sweet with the creamer and reminded him of her.
“I thought you’d go into a Brick spiral and take thirty steps back after tonight,” she said.
“A Brick spiral?”
“When you let yourself get a little too close to what you want and then you…I don’t know, leave the island for an entire summer to make sure you don’t get it.”
He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of the chair. “Remi,” he sighed. “I’m sorry about that.”
Thinking about her eager hands cupping him through his jeans as he pinned her against a wall in an alley wasn’t helping him focus on what she needed to talk to him about.
How could he want her so much when what they’d just done had gutted him, emptied him, then refilled him? How could he want to do so many other things to her?
“Tell me why you left that way,” she said. “Tell me that, and then I can tell you my thing.”
He heaved a sigh and swiped a hand over his face. “Fine. When we were in that alley. When you…”
“Grabbed your cock?” she offered smugly.
“Touched me,” he corrected, shooting her a warning look. “I knew there was nothing that would keep me from touching you back. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep my hands off you. I knew I’d spend the rest of that summer worshipping your body.”
“No wonder you hightailed it,” she said with sarcasm.
“You were always going to leave at the end of summer. No matter what, you were going to pack up and move on, and I’d be left here. Without you. I wouldn’t survive that if I knew what it felt like to make you mine. If I knew what it was like to have you on your knees in front of me like a good girl or bent over like a bad girl. I wouldn’t be able to function without you.”
“So you left,” she prompted softly.
He pinned her with his gaze. “It was better if I didn’t have you. Because then I could pretend.”
“Pretend what?”
“I could pretend that what I felt for you wasn’t real.”
She let out a breath. She was back to looking small and forlorn. But if he went to her now, he’d just end up fucking her against the glass as the sun came up.
He knew her. Inside out. So he dug into his Remington Ford survival pack. “Did you really think I’d have regrets about being with you after tonight?” he asked.
She shot him her “no shit, Sherlock” look. “The thought may have crossed my mind.” She watched him over the rim of her mug, and he tried not to focus on the fact that he could see a little triangle of purple satin between her legs when she pulled her knees up to her chin. “You let yourself off your leash. You let me in.”