Page 73 of In Your Dreams, Holden Rhodes

We kissed as I carried her up the stairs. My blood rushed with anticipation. Was this happening?

At the doorway to her bedroom, she put a hand of the doorframe to stop us. “Wait.”

I paused. Pink flushed her cheeks and she was breathing hard. Her other hand came to my shoulder and her gaze locked on mine, wide and uncertain.

“If we do this, we should be careful,” she whispered, eyes on me.

I pressed her against the doorframe and lowered my mouth to the soft, smooth skin of her neck. “I have a condom.”

“No,” she breathed. “I mean, yes, that’s good, but I meant in terms of our deal.”

I stilled. “What do you mean?” I asked against the dip at the bottom of her neck.

“We want different things, in the end, and I’m going back to Toronto,” she whispered into my hair. “So we should be careful.”

I hated that she was right. I lifted my head and searched her eyes. “What do you want?”

She wet her lips. “Friends with benefits.”

I frowned at her.

“It’ll be easier this way,” she insisted. “When you find someone, we end it. No attachments, just sex.”

Just sex. It already wasn’t just sex. I craved her. I’d been thinking about her for weeks. I thought about her laughing at the bar, how excited she had been over bathroom tiles, and the way her eyes lit up when she pitched the renovations to me all those weeks ago.

The way we almost kissed in the forest. The way I thought about her constantly.

I knew she was going home, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t enjoy it while she was here.

“Fine.”

She relaxed in my arms.

I tilted my chin to the bedroom. “Can we go inside now?”

She grinned and nodded, and I dropped my mouth to hers.

28

Holden

“Fuck, you’re pretty,”I told her, easing her back onto the bed before I pulled her shirt off. Her bra was light pink with tiny bows. I ran my finger along the top edge of one bra cup and she shivered. “I’m going to make you come so fucking hard tonight.”

She snorted and I cocked my head at her with amusement.

“Something funny?”

She grinned wider. “You’re confident.”

Deep in my brain, something primal and possessive woke up. “Yeah. I am.” I pulled one bra cup down and set my mouth on the tight peak.

Her head fell back and my other arm wrapped around her waist to hold her up. I laved and sucked the point, moving to kneeling on the floor beside the bed. As my mouth worked, her legs widened a fraction. I let myself grin against her skin. My blood boiled with want. I had been hard since we started fooling around downstairs, and my balls ached with the need to spill into her.

My hand slid from her breast, and while I held eye contact with her, I undid her jeans. Her hands came to my shoulders while I helped her step out of them.

“Lay down,” I murmured, pressing her hips back and guiding her to the bed.

She lay back, propped up on her elbows to watch me, and I admired the matching panties.

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