Page 96 of Slapshot Baby

He's asleep.

And I am burning alive.

His arm is draped across my stomach, his fingers curled loosely against the silk over my hip.

The ache between my legs is unbearable. Every inch of my skin is sensitized, every nerve still lit from his hands, his mouths.

I could have had him. His hands pushing the lace aside. His body filling mine with the slow, devastating patience I already know he's capable of.

All it required was the one thing I can't give.

Biscuit pads into the room and collapses beside the bed with a heavy sigh.

Kai's breath is warm and even against the back of my neck. His arm tightens in his sleep, pulling me closer. His hips shift forward just enough that the hard ridge of him presses firmly against me.

A sound escapes my throat. Small, involuntary, swallowed before it fully forms.

I close my eyes but can't sleep. My body won't let me.

Because the man wrapped around me offered me everything tonight and I handed it back. And lying here in the dark, aching and unsatisfied and pressed against the warmth of him, I am terrified that the reason it hurts this much isn't the sex I didn't get.

It's that some part of me wanted to say yes.

16

KAI

A Real Date

Her mouth. That's what comes first in my dream.

Not her face or her name or the sound of her voice. Just the wet heat of her mouth dragging across my collarbone while her nails score down my chest.

The next part is Ava on her back in my bed.

Her spine arches when I push inside her for the first time. Her thighs clamp around my hips. The sound she makes is not a moan exactly, more like the air being torn from her lungs.

My hips are rolling into hers. Slow. Deep. Her hands are gripping my shoulders hard enough to leave marks I find the next morning in the mirror.

The way she looks at me after, flushed and wrecked and trying to reassemble her defenses while I’m already peeling them back again.

I wake up hard.

Not morning-casual hard. The kind of hard that has a pulse and zero interest in patience.

Ava is still in my arms. Her back is pressed against my chest, her hair spread across the pillow between us, smelling like citrus. Her silk robe has ridden up in the night, bunched around her waist. Her bare thighs are warm against mine.

My cock is pressed against the curve of her ass through my joggers. Every breath she takes shifts her body against me in a way that makes my teeth clench.

I don't move.

Not because I don't want to.

My body has drafted a detailed proposal for what should happen next. It involves sliding my hand between her thighs and finding out if she's as wet as she was when I held her last night.

But the woman in my arms chose to stay after I refused to give her the detached, eyes-closed version of sex she wanted. She turned toward the wall and let me wrap myself around her.

That's worth more than anything my cock is currently lobbying for.