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One big hand behind my head, the other framed my jaw, thumb again grazing my lips in a ghost of a caress.

"Tea?"

"Mm?" I felt faint, dizzy—almost drunk.

I felt his breath on my lips, felt his whisper as much as heard his words. "Gonna kiss you."

"Oh." My head was spinning.

I felt his smile. "Oh?" He nuzzled my lips with his. "Or oh-kay?"

I couldn't form words. Couldn't get my mouth to cooperate. Shit, I couldn't pin down a single thought or emotion; my heart and mind and body were a wild maelstrom of conflict and desire.

So I said nothing.

Instead, I stabbed my fingers into his hair, and I kissed him.

Chapter 11

Jax

Tea trembled on my lap like a livewire.

When I told her I was going to kiss her, I fully expected her to levitate across the clearing. Instead, she kissed me.

My heart slammed against the prison bars of my ribcage, and my stomach opened into a bottomless hollow and my skin tightened around my bones, tingling with electric heat as her soft, warm lips slammed against mine.

It wasn't a tender kiss or a slow one, a gentle kiss or a soft one. It was sudden and abrupt and demanding, her fingers driving into my hair at the back of my neck and pulling my face down to hers. Her mouth was eager and greedy, her lips slanting across mine, tilting the other way just as I angled to meet her.

She pulled away an instant after our lips touched the second time, a pause for breath that came out as a shaken gasp, a delicate whimper that was at odds with her tough, stoic, take-charge-and-take-no-shit persona.

That sound was my undoing.

I needed more.

I grasped her slender hips and twisted her on my lap so she had no choice but to wedge my hips in the V of her thighs. She leaned into me and her mouth slid open and wet over mine and her breasts were hard buttons against my chest and her hands fluttered under my chin like baby birds attempting first flight.

"Jax," she breathed, fingers of both hands dimpling the line of my jaw, forehead resting on mine, nose alongside nose, lips almost but not quite touching.

“Yeah, Beautiful?"

She shook her head, and I heard her breath catch. "Fuck. I'm—I'm not—”

"What?'

"Beautiful?" Her tone made it a question. I tilted my face and kissed her cheek, her jaw, the corner where earlobe met jaw, and she gasped again. “Yeah, Tea." I found the triple-looped elastic of the hair tie at the bitter end of her braid, tugged it free, combed my fingers through her hair to loosen the weave until her raven’s wing-black locks hung free. “Beautiful."

I desperately wanted her to kiss me again. To show me she wanted me. I knew it was pathetic, but I needed more than anything in life to feel truly wanted by a woman. To erase the years of longing for someone eternally out of reach.

More than that, I wanted Tea to want me. I wanted her to like me. To be attracted to me. To need me. I wanted to impress her. I wanted to show her that I saw so much more in her than just the tough, skilled, competent pilot, more than just the hard-but-fair Lt. Commander who saw the world in black and white and right and wrong, more than just the woman who'd had to forge an iron-hard persona just to get the recognition and credit she deserves. I wanted her to know that I saw her, the woman.

I wanted her to know what it felt like to be craved, desired, worshipped—protected.

I wanted to be the one she could be small and soft and weak with. The one she showed her tender side to.

She shifted away from me. "I have to be hurting you."

I held her in place, my hands around her waist between hips and ribs. "Nope."