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He was mine. And I was his. Maybe I always had been, and we were just waiting for the perfect time. Or, I had to admit to myself, maybe there wasn’t such a thing as a perfect time for anything. This story always ended with us together, no matter when it happened. But as Ian slid his tongue against mine with a groan yanked deep from his chest, his hands clutching me in a breathtakingly tight hold, I didn’t care much about the maybes or the what might have beens or what-ifs.
I tilted my head, allowing the angle of the kiss to change, and I pressed up on tiptoes because I couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t kiss him deep enough, couldn’t feel enough of his body against mine.
Just as quickly, he tore his mouth away, his breath ragged and panting against my lips.
“I didn’t practice anything. I didn’t know what to say or how to tell you that the thought of fucking this up was the scariest thing I’ve ever faced,” he said, a growling edge to his voice that had me shivering. He kissed me again, a hard, fast kiss. “But I love you. I love you. I love you.”
With a short sob, I cupped his face in my hands and brushed my lips over his, luxuriating this time in the feel of his mouth and the heat of his skin. In the soft slide of his tongue when he wound it around my own, and the scratch of his short beard against my palms as we kissed and kissed and kissed.
The strength of his arms banded around my body was a heady thing, and he turned us so that I was braced against the truck. Ian’s hands skirted my waist and hips, the side of my breasts, and up over my shoulders, his fingers digging into my hair with a goose bump-pulling groan that I wanted to hear on a loop for the rest of eternity.
He broke away, eyes searing into mine as our chests heaved. “Say it.” A smile ghosted over my lips, and he stared down at them like he was delirious from need. “I want to hear you say it, Harlow,” he commanded.
There was a moment where I wanted to tease him. To edge this moment out to its breaking point with something flirty and sweet, with my fingers tracing the hard muscles underneath his shirt because I desperately wanted to do that too.
But I couldn’t.
My heart was pressed to the seams with love for him. Knowing that he loved me back, and we were going to do this together left no other choice than naked honesty.
His knuckles brushed down the side of my cheek, and I clutched his hands in mine, dragging my nose over the line of his fingers while he touched my jaw and my lips.
“You are the love of my life, Ian Wilder,” I said, tears filling my eyes. “And there is nothing to be scared of. Not when we’re together.” The first tear fell as I kissed him sweetly. He pulled back, his own eyes glossy too. With the pad of his thumb, he brushed the tear away. “My heart has been yours since we were five years old, and I don’t ever want it back.”
There were moments in life like this one—when your entire universe goes crystal clear, blindingly bright with the kind of hope that hurts. I’d only ever experienced it once, with Sage’s first ear-splitting cry, when they set her on my chest—covered in goo and the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.
And now, I saw it in Ian’s eyes and felt it the way my heart beat his name over and over and over. It was the kind of love I’d never be able to write down, the kind of perfect acceptance and understanding that made it hard to form words.
The sky above us was soft blues and oranges and pinks as the sun disappeared, stars hadn’t quite appeared in their sparkling blanket yet, but I knew they were there. And as he bent again, his hands coasting down my back while he took my mouth in another deep, seeking kiss, I wanted to stamp every detail into the most important part of my brain.
This was what perfect felt like.
The callouses on his hands as they skated underneath my shirt and dragged over the skin on my back. The way his tongue swept into my mouth as he pressed me backward from the force of his kiss. The way he held me tight against his chest and pushed between my hips when I wrenched my thigh against his side.
And it was knowing that we weren’t stealing a moment, that this feeling was ours to bottle up and relive every single day for the rest of our lives.
Ian dragged kisses along the edge of my jaw, and I stared up at that beautiful, dark sky, a pleasing warmth curling under my skin when I realized we had the entire night to ourselves. He tugged on the lobe of my ear, and I sucked in a hissing breath, my fingers sliding underneath his shirt and mapping the thin line of hair that bisected his flat, muscular stomach.
With a deep groan, he slanted his mouth over mine again, his hands clutching at my backside over my jeans. The hard, unyielding shape of him pressed against me tugged a mewling sound from my throat. Oh, this was going to be so good.
Ian wrenched his mouth away and stared down at me, his pupils huge in his eyes.
“What?” I whispered.
“Did you eat dinner?”
The lightning-quick subject change left me blinking stupidly up into his ridiculously handsome face. “What?” I said again.
He grinned, quick and heated and so adoring that I felt my knees tremble. Ian leaned down and kissed the tip of my nose. “I think I should feed you, if you skipped out on dinner.”
“Wh—”
“I know asking what three times in a row was not on your list of questions, sparky.”
My eyes narrowed, and I curled my fingers around his belt. “No, but my questions are in direct relation to you, and you are making no sense. If we’re going inside, I want to have sex,” I said crisply. “With you. Preferably more than once because we have no one to interrupt us for the entire night.”
He cocked an eyebrow and pressed me back against the truck again, ducking down to whisper against the shell of my ear. “Don’t you remember what I said?”
As he said it, his hand pushed underneath my shirt, the edge of his thumb circling my belly button before he dragged the back of his knuckles along my ribs. My breath was coming in embarrassing pants. I could hardly think, let alone answer.
