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Including her relationship with Dillon. That’s what it was—an honest-to-God relationship. They’d started to build something real and she couldn’t wait to see what happened next.
If he ever came back, anyway.
To keep herself busy, she tidied the store and sprayed a little cinnamon air freshener to dispel the last of the smoke smell. It probably hadn’t been the smartest move to set off a fire indoors but she’d needed to do something concrete to celebrate. She’d left the past in the past and she was moving on into her very bright future.
And she was a little drunk.
Not too much. Just enough to incite a buzz in her bloodstream. She couldn’t wait to see Dillon. Tonight would be the best night of her life. She wasn’t even scared to get on his bike anymore. Right now she wasn’t scared of anything.
The jingle of bells made her glance up and grin. The sight of his welcome face and that spiky little crown of hair he kept mumbling about getting cut made her so happy that she charged him, taking him off guard as she leaped into his arms. He staggered, barely holding on to her, and she sealed her mouth to his, drawing on his full lower lip until he groaned. “Lexa, wait—”
“I like that. Lexa. So sexy.” She bit his flesh and caressed the wound with her tongue. He tasted like the rain that had just started slipping down the windows and she could see the droplets beading on his temples. “Call me that when you’re inside me. Here. Right here.”
“Wait. No. Alexa,” he said pointedly as he slid her down his body and her heels thudded on the parquet floor. “We need to talk.”
But she wouldn’t be dissuaded. She wanted her celebration, dammit, and she refused to see anything in his eyes except the arousal that had been on low boil inside her all day. There was nothing so important it couldn’t wait.
“Do you understand what today meant to me?” she whispered, branding his mouth with hers. “How much I need tonight? Just. This.” She punctuated each word with an openmouthed kiss against his stubbled throat and reached down to cup his stiffening cock. Ah, see, he wasn’t nearly as reluctant as he pretended. Her abrupt touch ripped a groan from him and he reeled back, holding her at arm’s length.
He stared into her eyes in the thin beam of light from the cold case, the only light she’d left on. The shadows swallowed his expression whole, but she could feel the way he tracked her face. First with his burning gaze, then with the backs of his fingers. Up the slope of her cheeks, over her temples. Along her quivering lips. The reverence in his strokes spoke to her, as if he were conveying without language exactly what she meant to him. How much she mattered.
How much this mattered.
“Goddammit, Alexa.”
Without warning, he dragged her into his arms again. She shuddered as he sucked on the area between her neck and her shoulder, drawing with such powerful suction that her whole body vibrated. Moisture dampened her panties and her breasts swelled, nipples rising insistently against the soft cups of her bra.
She wanted his hands there. Not on her sides, sliding up and down. Her blouse whispered against her skin with his movements, another subtle torture.
When he whirled her toward the counter, she gasped and slapped her palms down to balance herself. She sensed rather than saw him kneel behind her. “What’re you doing?” she managed when a flash of lightning blazed across the store and she reflexively closed her eyes.
He slid his hands up the front of her legs, his touch as silky as the ribbons they’d fought into bows that afternoon. His thumbs eased into her heels, tipping her feet up. Then the pads of his fingers were sliding up the back of her legs, tracing the seam of her hose.
“All day,” he murmured, nipping the hollow of her knee. She startled, nails digging into the counter. “All day I’ve watched you walk in these, and this seam taunted me. This line of black stretching from the soles of your feet up to heaven. You hiding it from my eyes under this.” He toyed with the hem of her skirt, which might not have existed at all for how exposed she felt. “But I could still see you. I knew
what you’d look like under here, and what you were saving for me.”
She didn’t speak as he rolled up the thin material. His sharp inhale upon glimpsing the lacy-topped hose and garters gave her a moment’s enjoyment, then his teeth grazed her thigh and she forgot about everything but his mouth. His teeth. The pressure of his tongue. Her sex clutched around air and she cried out, the sound becoming a moan at the relief his lips offered.
He’d barely touched her and already she blazed for him. His fingers danced up and down the back of her calf, eliciting quivers she couldn’t suppress. He tormented her with an easy expertise she really didn’t care to dwell on, but she sure took advantage of it. Without hesitation, she rocked into his movements, as if he’d become her puppet master and she only existed to do as he bid.
An erotic thrill shivered up her spine at the sensation of his wide palms smoothing her skirt higher, baring the silk of her panties. He ran a fingertip around the scalloped edge and murmured words of praise she strained to hear. Just his voice made her quake.
Before this week, she wouldn’t have called herself a romantic, despite making her living tending flowers. Creating the fantasy of a perfect, pretty, flower-filled world made her happy, but it hadn’t changed the darkness she carried inside, that part of her that insisted happiness was something a person clung to before life and circumstance took it back again. But being with Dillon, more than anything else, made her believe. In romance. In hope. That not everything had to be difficult or hurt.
He’d shown up at the absolute worst time. Or the best, depending on her point of view. All she knew was that a week ago she’d been mired in worry and now, this very minute, all that bore down on her was sweet, sensual need.
Another clap of thunder shattered the web of intimacy he’d spun around them, until he nibbled the crease between her bikinis and the top of her leg and she jolted right back into that hot, dark space. He didn’t speak, at least not loud enough for her to decipher what he said. Somehow that only built the intensity of the moment.
Slowly, so slowly, he crept toward the heart of her, where she craved his attention. Moans slipped through her parted lips. Her pulse pounded in her head. Between her legs.
When he finally brushed her mound, the cry that left her bordered on agony. That he followed that fleeting touch with another, then another still, didn’t quell the ache. Only when he nudged aside the damp fabric and stroked her for real, worshipping her with every glide of his fingertips, did she expel the breath she’d held trapped in her throat.
“Oh, princess.” His voice sounded as gravelly as rocks thrown against a window, and he panted just as she did. Amazing how that nickname now turned her on instead of pissed her off. She could hear his affection, savored it in his caresses. He traced the curve of her ass with his tongue, stopping just short of where his fingers continued to tease her. Dipping in and out. Sliding along her folds. Circling. Toying with her where she swelled for him. “I wish I could see you.”
Half-tempted to draw her knee up on the desk to give him more room, she stared blindly at the sheets of rain slapping the windows. Fluttering the awning above the door, battering the roof. None of it had reached her consciousness before. How could it, when her heartbeat chugged in her ears and her body throbbed with utter awareness of the man who ruled her?
Lightning illuminated the shadowy room at the exact moment he plunged a finger inside her. She bit down hard on her lower lip to stifle a cry. “God, yes.”
