Pushing myself off his chest so that he wouldn’t be crushed under my weight, I tried to make space for my knee between his body and the back of the sofa without rubbing against him. No such luck. He groaned underneath me, and I stopped moving altogether.
“I relish all control to you,” Luke said, his gaze intense as he searched my eyes. “Whatever you want, you have me.”
I took a deep breath meant to calm myself. It didn’t work, of course. One thing that made this all a little less embarrassing was Luke’s rapidly beating heart under my palm. If he was nervous, too, we were two peas in a pod.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It wasn’t your fault.”
He waited as if expecting me to tell him what exactly happened that wasn’t his fault. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. If my earlier freeze hadn’t yet ruined the moment, talking about it surely would. I couldn’t tell him about it, even under different circumstances. All I wanted was to forget the past, keep on kissing Luke, and hopefully not make this moment any more weird than it already was.
“I don’t know what to do with the control you gave me,” I admitted pathetically, still perched on top of him. Still absolutely unmoving. So much for not making things weird.
“Anything you want, Red Cheeks. You can take us back to the kitchen, and we’ll have another desert. Or you can kiss me. You set the pace. Anything, Haylee. Anything, and it’s yours. I told you.”
He said that, but the way his eyes were flicking between mine and my lips said enough about what he was hoping I’d choose. Kissing him had been amazing, and I didn’t want it to stop either. Most certainly not like that. With me running away from him.
I shifted in Luke’s lap. His hips bucked involuntarily—I think— and he moaned. My cheeks had flamed at this point, and my stomach had imprisoned a bundle of nerves, but that sound touched something in the core of me. Still, I almost apologised again. For what? The accidental friction he seemed to enjoy? That would be silly.
I bottled up my anxiety and focussed on the warmth pooling in my belly. I was in control, he said. I could do anything I wanted. Anything at all. So I leaned closer to his lips. He wet them expectantly as I hovered over him. His breath smelled like the chocolate we’d eaten; he’d tasted like it, too. Sweet and enticing.
The first brush of my lips against his was as tentative as his had been. He let me take my time deepening the kiss, giving me control just as he’d told me he would. I cupped his face, exploring his lips like they were a new music track and I was to choreograph a dance to it. I learned what made him let out guttural sounds and chase my lips if I pulled away to take a breath. He learned things, too, like the fact that his tongue would make me squirm even as I tried my hardest not to rub against him too much—or at all, really. He kept teasing me with it, until he was drinking my moans like they were fresher than water.
We were just kissing. His hands rubbed up and down my back a few times and got tangled in my hair, but that was the extent of his exploration. My own hands didn’t venture any lower than his chest either. While I did not intentionally create any extra friction between our bodies, he was stiff in every sense of the word. Not frozen like I had been under him, more like forcefully still. As if he didn’t want to bring any attention to how much he wanted to do more than just kiss me. We both pretended not to be turned on by each other, and it was getting more difficult by the second.
Luke practically vibrated with unreleased tension, and I felt hot, oh-so hot all over. Our kisses grew more hurried than tentative. All consuming in every way, and his arms caged me in against his chest as he forgot who was supposed to be in control, and I forgot all the reasons why he had given it to me in the first place.
At that moment, he had all of me. Every single facet in my body, heart and soul. He could have taken that ‘anything’ he’d given me the power of, and I would have let him. No boundaries applied to us at that moment. Nothing could stand between us and not be burned to crisp by the heat urging us onward. That undeniable flame that sparked whenever he was near. Fire that ravaged the walls around my heart until they crumbled, leaving me completely and utterly at his mercy.
Right then, I knew: I was in love with Luca Stefano Ombrello.
Excitement. Expectation. Exploration.
THE KISS ON LUKE’S?sofa unleashed something within me. I was uncharacteristically reckless and a whole lot attached to his side every moment we weren’t working or sleeping. We did both of those separately. The first was set in stone and unchangeable; I didn’t know a thing about programming. I was getting more and more interested in changing the latter, however. I couldn’t quite find a way to express it, which was why I kept that little fact all to myself. And to Glen, of course. That girl knew every single secret I kept.
“Oh my Goood, Hallie!” she screeched when I got back from my failed attempt at keeping Luke at a distance with the entire vase full of roses, which he had on the countertop the other day. None of them had little notes around their stems, but I didn’t need those to know how he was feeling. We’d pretty much established that. “What did he say? What did he say? Tell me!!”
I giggled. “That he doesn’t care if my mother is the Devil incarnate. He’d rather eat sawdust than let me walk away like this.”
