Page 86 of I'm Your Guy
He sinks down beside me. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
But he does it. He leans back, resting his head beside mine. He stretches his long legs out on the rug. And now he’s staring up at the tree with unseeing eyes.
I take hold of his hand. After a beat, his fingers fold over mine. We just lie there quietly for a while. And after fifteen minutes or so, I hear him sigh as he relaxes against the rug.
“Tell me,” I prompt. “What’s the first Christmas you remember?”
“Dunno.”
I squeeze his hand. “Try harder. I remember getting a Fisher Price farm from Santa Claus when I was four.”
A pause. “Did you redecorate it?”
“Well…” I haven’t thought about this for years. “Not exactly. But I upgraded the pigsty. It was too small. And I installed a Playmobil TV in the cow’s part of the barn.”
He laughs, and the sound of it fills my chest with warmth. “What I wouldn’t give to see you at four, thinking about an accent wall for your toy barn.”
His thumb strokes my palm, and I feel a stir of desire for this big, unpredictable beast of a man. He’s obviously in pain, and I hate that. Making him laugh feels like a victory. “Now it’s your turn. Earliest Christmas memories.”
“Uh… Okay. I remember when I was in kindergarten, my mom told me I couldn’t get out of bed until six. But I woke up every hour to check the clock. I wanted a guitar.”
“Wait—do you play the guitar?”
“Nope. Not a single chord. But kids think they can do anything, you know? I thought I’d be jamming like the Boss on day one. She gave me the guitar—kid-sized. But I ended up having more fun with my new action figures.”
“I can see you as an action-figure kind of guy. Do you lean toward Superman or Batman?”
“Superman all the way,” he says immediately. “I especially enjoyed the Henry Cavill movies in my teen years. Possibly because of his bulge.”
I cackle. “Hear you. But I’m a Batman guy. Because Batman is a design solution.”
“What do you mean?”
“Without his suit and his gear, he’s not a superhero at all, right? He’s just a lonely dude in a cave. To become Batman, he needed kickass design. The creepy suit. The perfect car and all those tools. He designed the world he needed to survive.”
Tommaso rolls onto his side to look at me, and I expect laughter. But when I meet his gaze, I get a little lost in the deep pools of his dark eyes. He’s not laughing at all. “You kill me, you know that? I love your brain.”
Oh. My heart thuds against my chest as I roll onto my side, too. “This is going to sound weird, but…”
He lifts one hand and strokes the side of my face, his thumb sliding across my cheekbone.
I almost can’t breathe. “That’s the sexiest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.”
“Huh.” A flicker of a smile. “I’m not exactly famous for turning people on.”
We’re so close together that my heart begins to pound. “Maybe you’ve been hanging out with the wrong people, then.”
“Maybe,” he says gruffly, his dark gaze sweeping my face and landing on my mouth.
What happens next feels inevitable.
He closes the distance slowly, but without hesitation. His generous mouth meets mine, and that broad hand cups my face.
Bad idea, my brain shouts. He’s just feeling emotional! This will end in tears!
But my body doesn’t listen. At the contact, my body arches toward his, like a reflex. I kiss him back, because I can’t help myself. I’ve spent the last month trying to hold this in.
He makes a soft sound from deep inside his chest as his kiss deepens. He parts my lips with his tongue and invites himself inside.
