Page 12 of Naked

“Ah yes, collecting data on the feasibility of even having a relationship is very smart. It will give us valuable insight into the futility of our future friends-with-benefits situation.”

Jesus.She was going to kill me. “Tilley. We are either friends or lovers who happen to be friends. Those are the two options.”

She blinked rapidly. Clearly the word “lovers” wasn’t computing in her ballplayers-don’t-date brain.

And since she agreed to my rules, I no longer felt obliged to keep to my side of the table. I moved quickly so she didn’t have time to react mid computational meltdown, and slid my arm behind her, pulling her close enough for our noses to touch.

“Friends-with-benefits is cold. It’s emotionless. I want more than that.”

Her eyes fluttered and I noticed her breathing wasn’t even. “More?”

“You make me sound Iike a sex crazed bully. I want more than sex and I genuinely hope I’m not a bully.” She smelled...fantastic. It made my head a little fuzzy and like I needed to touch her.

“You’re not a bully,” she whispered.

“But you think I’m sex crazed? Why?” I tilted my head a little to the right and ran my nose along hers. It was the only place we touched other than where my knee grazed her thigh. “Do I have a different woman every night? No. I spend my nights with you. I drop you off and I go home. Alone.”

She swallowed hard and made a noise that I really hoped was a moan.

“I don’t want cold from anyone, but especially not from you. If we’re going to be friends plus more, I want it to be warm and emotional, and I’m not going to lie, I’m a possessive son of a bitch, Til. That’s why I can’t be friends-with-benefits. Because if we’re together, I’m going to want to make damn sure everyone knows it.” My lips almost touched hers. “May I kiss you?”

This time the noise she made was clear and loud. Like a mewl from a kitten. She grabbed my face and kissedme.Kissed me like a starving person. Like I’d strung her out for an hour without an orgasm and finally said she could come.

“You’re like catnip,” she muttered between frantic kisses.

I wrapped my arms around her and moved her onto my lap where we could touch and kiss much easier. I slid my fingers into her curls, caressed her neck and chin, pulled the kisses I’d wanted for six goddamned months from her lips until I couldn’t breathe.

One thing was abundantly clear: I was painfully attracted to my best friend. These kisses weren’tnice.They were sex with our clothes on. I was aroused and ready, and while I was a healthy twenty-six year old male who could get hard just thinking about sex, this wasn’t the same thing. Everything with Tilley, from the moment I first saw her at the stadium, was high quality, electric, intimate connection. Wanting her wasn’t about scratching an itch. Wanting her wasnecessary.

I dropped kisses down her jawline and throat, remembering with great detail how her skin felt against my palms, how my mouth and my hands transformed her from my friend to my lover. I wanted that again. Naked and mine.

But to be successful, I needed to follow the rules. Otherwise the moment we touched down she’d instruct the pilot to fly her straight back to the UK.

Restraint—unfortunately—was in order.

I wrapped a long red curl around my index finger and studied the shades of color. “We still friends, Tilley Villanueva?”

Her hands fluttered over my shoulders before settling. “Yes. Why do you like kissing me?”

I huffed because she drove me crazy. “It makes me feel good. Does it make you feel good?”

“Yes,” she whispered. Like it was a secret.

Or it scared her.

I gently pulled the curl down, down, down until it popped back into a coil. Then I looked up into her questioning eyes. “Being friends with you is as natural as breathing.” We just fell in together, really. That first night at the bar was an accident. I tried to flirt with her, pick her up. But she ignored every advance. I knew now that she didn’t recognize my flirting because she believed ballplayers didn’t date, so clearly my advances weren’t flirting. Luckily she was a competitive pain in the ass. I couldn’t help but to rise to her challenges. She beat me at pool all while talking smack. It turned out we liked the same terrible comedies and her depth of sports knowledge far exceeded anyone I knew.

I held her gaze for several beats, hoping the connection made her actually hear my confessions. “The night we officially met? I’d been watching you for a couple of weeks already. I thought you were hot and since you kept popping up everywhere I went, I thought it was a sign. When I came over and asked you to join us, it wasn’t because I wanted to get beat at pool.”

Her eyes darted back and forth between mine, cataloguing my pupil dilation, reading my facial expression, checking and cross checking my words for hidden meanings. “Then why did you come over?”

“Because I wanted to know what it would feel like to kiss you. And now that I know, I don’t think I can stop.”

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