Page 148 of Scouting the Single Dad

In one fluid shift he stands, scooping me up as if I weigh nothing. My gasp breaks into a laugh when my legs lock around his waist and his forearms steel around me.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs, kissing me two strides to the bed, then laying me in the center. Hayes follows, a broad, warm gravity that parts my knees and steals the air from my lungs.

He braces above me and pauses—to have a long, hard look at me. Like he wants to memorize me in this moment before he devours me.

A brush of lips at the corner of my mouth. My chin. A soft bite to my bottom lip that sends sparks down my spine.

“Hi,” he whispers, stupidly sweet for a man wrecking me.

“Hi,” I breathe, already wrecked.

“I seriously fucking missed you.”

“I seriously fucking missed you too.” I laugh as he begins a war with the zipper pull of my jeans; I lift my hips and he drags them down, slow enough to make me crazy, fast enough to confirm he’s desperate.

He struggles when they won’t slide past my thighs and curses, then finally yanks them free and tosses them to the floor, hovers above me, still wearing all his clothes.

“Tell me you’re here.”

“I’m here because I choose you.” I cup his face so he sees it—the promise, the ache, the joy of it all. “You and Benny.”

He groans and crashes his mouth to mine.

The kiss is nothing polite; it’s days of restraint snapping, teeth and tongue and the kind of hunger that makes my toes curl in the sheets with anticipation.

His palm cups my throat while the other hand slides down, down, claiming the back of my thigh and hauling me flush to the heat straining behind the fabric of his bottoms.

“Feel that?” he rasps against my mouth. “That’s how much I missed you.”

“Show me.” I fist his shirt. “Get naked, please.”

He shucks it off and leans back, broad chested and with cut lines I can’t wait to touch. I rake my nails lightly over his skin, and I help as he pulls at the drawstrings at his waist, my greedy hands helping . . . palms skimming over the flex of his stomach.

So tight. So different from mine.

My fingers slip lower, fingers teasing the bulge of his erection, and he groans again, fumbling to remove his pants. My shirt.

Heat rolls off him when he climbs back over me—bare skin to bare skin, solid and overwhelming. “Better?” he asks, voice shredded.

“So much.” I drag him down. Kiss him hard, relishing the skin-on-skin contact, smiling when he chases the curve of my mouth.

“I’m fucking starving,” he grumbles, kissing the side of my neck. Licking.

I laugh. “You should have ordered room service.”

“They didn’t have what I want.”

“What’s that?” I taunt breathlessly, already knowing the answer.

“You.”

His mouth closes over my nipple, and he sucks, nips. Soothes with a slow lick, hand palming the other breast, inching his way down my body . . .

“I love you like this.” He kisses the soft inside of my knee, then the other, teasing until I swear at him. He laughs—wrecked—and finally puts his mouth where I need it, tongue sure, fingers anchoring my hips when I try to chase the high.

And as far as makeup sex goes?

It’s a truce and a trophy, an apology and a promise—fire and comfort braided together until I can’t tell where the ache ends and the relief begins.