I swallowed hard as my body continued to react to his touch, pebbling more from his nearness than the cold.
“Just spill it, Dawson,” I said.
His lips fluttered against the curve of my ear, a playful, sensual move that had my grip on his forearms flexing. Even as he teased, I could still feel the tension in him that had been there earlier as well. The tightness of his chest, the way he held his shoulders back. Secrets were eating him up.
“I’ve already imagined the worst,” I said quietly. “I’m pretty sure you couldn’t tell me anything that would surprise me at this point.”
I tilted my head, exposing more of my neck to the side, inviting him in. He groaned and then bit my earlobe softly before flicking his tongue along the skin. My knees went weak. I would have stumbled if he hadn’t been holding me up.
“You smell like heaven,” he said quietly. “A scent I’ve never been able to get out of my head since the very first day I met you.”
The fact that he was acknowledging an attraction to me that I’d wanted him to have for years made me want to cry and dance and shove my tongue in his mouth all at the same time. But I was also afraid of moving, afraid of breaking whatever trance or dream or fantasy we were both in at the moment. I made do with running my fingers up the sleeves of his dress shirt that he’d rolled to his elbows, my cool fingers skating over his warmth.
His lips hit the sensitive skin below my ear, and I literally couldn’t stop the moan that escaped me if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t, because the stiffness that had been in his shoulders and chest suddenly found its way to another part of his body. One that was pressed up tight against my rear end. One I could feel clearly through the thin layer of the silken dress.
I pushed back into it and was rewarded with a guttural growl from him.
He trailed kisses from my ear, down my neck, across my collarbone to the edge of my shoulder and back, inhaling deeply as he went as if he could absorb me through smell alone.
“Dawson,” I said with a soft cry of desire but also a beg. “Tell me.”
“That’s the Vi I know. There’s no distracting you.” He chuckled softly as he continued to layer kisses along my shoulder and neck.
“I want to be distracted. I want you to kiss every visible spot, then undo that damn bow and kiss every spot the dress is hiding,” I told him the truth.
He sucked in a breath, trying to pull back a little, but I moved my hands backward to his waist, locking him to me. Wanting him there. Wanting him to know that I didn’t just look like I’d grown up. I was grown up. I knew what to do with a man. I knew what I wanted from him.
“But I can’t be distracted from this,” I told him quietly. “I won’t let you destroy your life.”
He withdrew his lips, and an iciness hit more than just my skin. I turned in his arms so I could face him.
“Shit or get off the pot, Langley.”
He grinned, but his eyes were tormented, a mix of so many emotions I didn’t understand. Lust. Regret. Hope.
He bent to place his mouth by my ear again and, so quietly I barely heard the words, whispered, “I’m undercover.”
Goddamn, James Bond it was. I should have known. As much as everyone had wanted me to believe Dawson was a bad boy with a chip on his shoulder, I’d always seen the truth in him. The boy wanting to be something more. Something worthy. He hadn’t been able to see that he was already enough, because his father had always told him he wasn’t.
I rested my forehead on his chest, warring feelings flooding me like the ones I’d seen in him. Mixed in with my desire and hope was fear. For him. For Jada. For Dax.
All of those emotions were aching to be released. So, I gave in to the one thing I could give in to. My longing. I lifted myself onto my toes and kissed him, letting the warmth and taste and scent of him settle over my soul into all the places that had always been his.
Dawson
BREAK IN
“You are the only one.
The only one that sees me,
That trusts me and believes me.”
Performed by Halestorm w/ Amy Lee
Written by Proal / Hale / Holman / Graves
She’d walked into the restaurant lookinglike a damn angel, and my resolve to stay away crumbled like day-old bread. She wasn’t the kind of angel you wanted to put on a pedestal and leave there. She was one I wanted to worship with every single inch of me covering every single inch of her. No innocent, sweet, bubbly girl in sight. All deadly, sensuous woman.
