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“What?” she croaked, her eyes fixed on his mouth as it came closer, the spell weaving sticky fingers around her again, pulling her into its web.
“It’s almost midnight. Are you ready?”
Tamara’s pulse tripped off the scale. “No,” she said, her voice all low and breathy.
Luke halted his progress, his thumb lazily stroking along the slope of her cheekbone. “It’s just one little kiss,” he said. “What are you scared of?”
Good question. But this didn’t feel like just a kiss. “That I’m going to want more.”
Luke smiled at her, slow and sexy. “Would that be so bad?”
Tamara didn’t know—she couldn’t think. Her body was vibrating with need. With the overwhelming desire to feel his mouth on hers. To feel his body on hers.
He didn’t wait for her answer, returning instead to his inexorable journey closer. “Ten...nine...eight…” He counted aloud as his other thumb tilted the angle of her jaw. “Seven…six…five…” His sheer masculine focus on her mouth was utterly paralyzing. “Four…three…two…” His lips continued their descent, inching nearer and nearer until they were so, so close. “This is your last chance, Tamara,” he said, and she felt the merest whisper of his mouth against hers with each word. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Tamara was incapable of speaking. Incapable of moving. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to. All she wanted was his kiss. She made some kind of noise, something gurgly and incomprehensible but very definitely consensual, and it was all Luke needed.
“One…Happy New Year, Tamara.”
The kiss was light. Tentative. As if he was expecting her to bolt and giving her plenty of room to do so. Which, in those few, lonely, endangered cells that existed in the more evolved area of her brain, she truly appreciated. Because the rest of her was pure animal.
She moaned and leaned into the kiss as her deprived system went into complete meltdown and Luke gave it the shot of testosterone she’d been craving. He tasted vaguely of beer—intoxicatingly male—but those damn insistent cells were yammering at the back of her brain it’s only supposed to be one little kiss and she dragged herself away before it escalated any further. She was breathing hard, her neck and face flushed, as he watched her through those flammable eyes and she savored the taste of him.
“No?” he queried, his voice soft and faintly burred, and it was gratifying when he cleared it, to know he was as affected as she’d been by the kiss.
“Gateway drug,” she murmured, desperately clinging to sensibilities that had been well and truly scrambled. She had to remember where she was and who she was with and not let a little horniness overrule common sense. A kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve was forgivable. Acceptable, even. Doing Georgia’s brother on the rug in front of the fire in his parents’ cabin, not so much.
Luke picked up her hand. “I’m not going anywhere, Tamara.” He placed her hand on his chest again, over his heart this time, and held it there. “You’re already under my skin.”
Tamara furrowed her brow, her gaze falling to where his hand covered hers. His heart pounded sure and steady beneath his warm flesh. A heart that had already known too many horrible things. God, but she wanted him. All of him. She wasn’t sure when this thing had gone from a stolen midnight kiss to something more—she just knew it had.
It was crazy. “We hardly know each other,” she whispered, looking into his earnest gaze.
He smiled. “We’ve been on ten dates.”
It took a few more seconds for her to let go. For the tension to drain from her body. For the decision to be made. “Goddamn it,” she muttered, sweeping the board aside with her other hand and launching herself at him.
Chapter Six
Midnight
What the hell.
They were the words that came to Tamara’s mind just prior to Luke pulling her into his lap as she reached for him, their lips slamming together on a rush of tangled need. His shoulders were broad and round, his back smooth and warm, his hair soft-spiky, like plush velvet against her palms, his thighs hard against her bottom.
His mouth was hot. Very hot.
And his erection was huge.
She ground herself down against it and his groan curled her toes. She pulled back, dragging in air through a throat thick with lust.
“Oh God,” he panted. “Please don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts?”
Tamara shook her head. Perhaps she should be, but she wasn’t. And once she committed to something, she always followed through. She was just that kind of girl.
She smiled at him as she reached for the hem of her shirt and hauled both it and her thermal top off in one easy movement. “Nope,” she murmured as Luke’s pupils dilated and his nostrils flared. He reached for her but she shoved hard at his chest, satisfied when he fell back against the rug.
He reached for her again but she batted his hand away. “I want to touch you,” he croaked.
