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My eyes fluttered closed. “Did you?”
The tips of his fingers found the bare skin of my back underneath the jersey. His skin was calloused, rough from years of doing what he’d done. His palm splayed along my back, and I had to press my thighs together. A weak attempt to ease the ache he was building in me.
“But I didn’t have words when I saw you,” he murmured. “Not the right ones.”
I tilted my head so I could look up at him. “I don’t know if there’s right or wrong about it.”
“To me there is.” He was so sincere. “How was I supposed to tell you how beautiful you look?”
My body froze as I stared up at him.
“The first time I saw you on those stairs in the house, I didn’t think there were words to describe what you made me feel.” His fingers traced over my spine. “Every time I see you, it happens. I don’t care whether you’re wearing a dress. Or ratty pajamas. Or a T-shirt.” His hand skirted the side of my throat, thumb brushing the edge of my jaw while I struggled to breathe. “You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and if I tried to find the right words for it today, I didn’t want you to think for one second that you’re somehow less beautiful any other time you walk into the room.”
My mouth was on his before I registered that I’d moved. And Burke caught up quickly. He wrapped me up in his arms, tight and strong and wonderful, groaning into my mouth as we kissed.
I carded a hand through his hair, delighting in the way we moved against each other.
His lips were dry and warm, moving over mine in slow sips and pulls. I pushed up on the balls of my feet and arched my back, trying to press as close as possible.
Burke angled his head and took the kiss deeper, a delicious groan that I felt all the way down my spine. He ate at my mouth, desperately. We were just out of view, and neither of us seemed to care.
I’d stay there all night, do just this, if it meant I could keep kissing him.
He was cranky.
And quiet.
He shut down when he didn’t know what to say.
He showed up for people, even when it tore at all the edges of his comfort.
And I was starting to suspect that he had no idea just how deeply I adored him for all that.
Nothing about him was what I’d expected, not when I used to try to picture the man I’d fall in love with. Maybe that’s what took us so long—trying to wrap our expectations around all these differences.
“Take me to the room,” I whispered in his ear, making sure my lips brushed against him while I did. “Mine, yours, I don’t care.”
His hands tightened, and when they did, I desperately wished for the power to vanish our clothes, to whisper a spell that would make us appear in a place with a bed and a door that bolted shut.
I pulled back, locking my eyes with his. I cupped the side of his face, smiling when he pulled my palm closer to his mouth, pressing a hot kiss there.
His eyes devoured my face, lingering on my lips.
“What do you want to do, Burke Barrett?”
It was what I’d wanted to know from him all along.
The thing he hadn’t been able to verbalize, even if he showed me in a thousand different ways that what he wanted was me.
He tilted my chin up, placing a featherlight kiss on my lips. He stayed there, breathing me in, and his hands skated up my back, over my shoulders, until he had my face framed between them.
“I want to count the freckles on your body with my tongue,” he said.
I sucked in a breath. “Okay.”
Another kiss. “And I want to see you spread out, every light in the room on so there’s not an inch of you I can’t see.”
I exhaled a shaky laugh.
