Big hands pushed her dress up around her hips. Clever thumbs got to work, kneading, pressing, creating a sensuous friction. Eager to keep up, she unbuttoned his dress pants and unfurled the hard, beautiful length of him.
What a sight. Fully-aroused and all hers.
She mentally chided herself for that hers thinking. That would not do.
She needed to keep her wits about her. This was what she’d been telling herself for weeks: don’t get sucked in by the dog or the man or the rootedness of it all. Keep it to the realms of pleasure, maybe a stretch to friendship. That’s why she defended him against his father’s verbal blows.
She was being a good friend, nothing else.
She started to stroke but he was already hard and perfect.
Despite the circumstances—the front seat of a car, the aftermath of a bad night, the desperation in that kiss—there was a reverence in how he touched her. How he slipped her breast out of her borrowed dress and brought it to his mouth. She arched off him, her head touching the roof of the car.
Unable to stand the pleasure, she moved her hands down, touching, mapping, loving this beautiful, pent-up, hurting man.
He was less closed off these days, but still bound by his upbringing. By the lessons his father had taught him. That only through a rigid self-control could he be worthy of that man’s love.
He needn’t exercise that kind of restraint here. She was determined to rattle Reid’s cage.
While he was clearly determined to destroy hers.
She suspected he could hold out all night, could demonstrate that control, to make a point. To himself, perhaps. He had nothing to prove to her.
She curled a hand around his neck and nudged his mouth away from her breast.
“I need you inside me.”
His hand trailed down her stomach, over her mound, his palm encouraging her thighs to part further. Gladly they obeyed his silent order.
“You’re … wet.”
Of course she was. This was Reid. “Now.”
The crinkle of foil, the quick adjustment to secure their protection, then he lifted her like she weighed nothing and brought her down to sheath him, the push excruciating in its deliberateness, exquisite in the pleasure wrought from her inner walls.
Both the ones at her core and the ones surrounding her heart.
“Ohhhh.” Her moan didn’t sound like her. Each cell had come to life and was now tingling with the stretch of thick, glorious fullness.
He closed his eyes, but if she had to feel it, she needed to see everything from him as well.
“Reid.”
His eyelids snapped open, and in those pools, she saw relief, pleasure, maybe even affection. Dangerous to think it. Even more dangerous to rely on it. She recentered herself, drawing on her seduction skillset. On that detached version of herself that loved sex without entanglement, life without roots, the present without a thought to the past or the future.
“Hi,” she whispered. “Stay with me. Talk to me.”
“You want to talk?” The words sounded strangled, which made her feel more in control. She was seductress and healer.
“Yes. Tell me what you’re doing. How good it feels.”
“Of course Kennedy wants to talk. Of course she wants a blow—” He lifted her body and thrust up into her slowly. So slowly. “… by-blow …” He pushed deeper, with a stroke that consumed. “… account of how I’m fucking her.”
“Yes. I want to hear all of that.”
He clasped her hand and held it over his heart, intertwined with hers.
“You want to hear how you’ve been driving me mad? How I’ve had to stroke one out twice a day just so I won’t embarrass myself in front of you? How I hate when my brother and every single guy on my team talks to you and takes your attention? How I despise the smiles you give them because it’s one less for me?”
This wasn’t what she had meant at all. She wanted him to verbalize his desire; she wasn’t even expecting it to be focused on her. After all, any woman in the roommate situation would have made him break. Because it was there.
Wouldn’t they?
But now he’d started, she wanted to hear everything.
“Those smiles for them …” He stroked a special spot and oh, that was good. “… aren’t the same as what I give you.”
He moved inside her, finding another untested point of pleasure. “They’re not worthy to look at you, Kennedy.”
Her heart liquefied. She knew her self-worth but in a general “I am woman—hear me roar” sense rather than a Kennedy-is-awesome sense. No one spoke to her like this because she didn’t allow them to get close.
She would never have expected Reid to be the first. Surly, rude, irritable Reid.
She craved his voice. Not just to hear him say nice things about her, but to hear him speak. To hear what was going on inside his head. His heart. His soul.
“More,” she murmured, meaning the words and the hands. Meaning Reid.
He rubbed his nose against hers, and it shouldn’t have been a turn-on but it was. A turn-on for her heart.
“You want to hear how I’ve wanted you since the minute you walked into my apartment? Longer than that. Since the first day I saw you at the coffee shop. You were talking to someone and you laughed at something they said, and my pulse went boom. And believe me, I have the steadiest fucking pulse on the planet.”
All this time? Surely, this was just the heat of the moment. Her ability to smart-ass her way out of this conversation failed her.
“You know what you are, Kennedy?”
She might have responded with a what, but it came out as a moan.
“Five foot two of chaos. You waltz in, disrupt everything, turn my life upside down, and make everything crazy.” He stroked deeper, making her moan.
Making her feel.
Now that he’d started, he wouldn’t stop. All these words, made for her and her alone. “I belong here.” His hands tightened on her ass, fusing their bodies and souls together. “You’re mine and I’m yours.”
“Reid, I—”
He sucked on her lip. “Just let me imagine, ma belle. Laissez-moi rêver.”
She didn’t need to understand French to know what he was saying.
Stay with me. Love me.
It wasn’t her intention to change up his life but that’s what happened when atoms collided, chemical reactions occurred, and new substances were created.
This was what happened when you let yourself fall.
32
Reid opened up the computer to check on an idea he had for Kennedy’s Christmas gift.
Last night, his roommate had been amazing, and that was before she had climbed aboard him in his car. She knew exactly what he needed. Her. Only her.
Something was different about the sex, too.
It wasn’t just that she called him decent, kind, and big-hearted—labels he would never have slapped on himself in a million years.
It wasn’t just her defense of him, though that was soul-wrenching in itself.
It was how she clutched him when she came, like she never wanted to let go. Like he was the one person who could hold her heart safe and give it the care it deserved. Kennedy needed him as much as he needed her.
But he was still worried about scaring her off. He had almost said something he couldn’t take back. He had almost begged her to stay.