Page 66 of If Not for My Baby
“Baby.” His eyes darken. “I’ll take care of you, I swear it.”
“You’re goingso slow.” I have half a mind to kick off my lucky jeans and give myself the release I’m craving.
But Tom only tips his hand under my shirt, fingertips stroking the skin of my ribs, the underside of my breast. Soothing, but also coiling me tighter. “Relax, will you?”
He’s so powerful when he speaks like that. That low, cajoling timbre of his voice. I nod, chastened. But it seems my pleas have not fallen on fully deaf ears, because Tom peels my shirt up and over my head and lets his eyes fall to my naked breasts.
He looks like he’s been stabbed with a dull knife. Makes a sound like it, too. “You’re perfect,” he says faintly. “I can hardly stand it.”
Then he brings his mouth back down to my chest, and without my shirt as a barrier his rough beard scrapes along the sensitive skin deliciously. I attempt to breathe as he sucks my nipple. He’s kissing my skin as soft and slow as I can fathom, each bite and nip a current of pleasure to my core. I can’t take it a minute longer and cry out, canting my hips. Tom grunts, and rubs a hand up my thigh as if in praise for my wanton noise. As if to say,See? You can take it—
I’ve all but wrapped myself around his torso—arms and legs clawing—and can feel how hard he is beneath his jeans. Despite all my fears, the worst of which are indescribable intheir ambiguity and all the more frustrating because of it—I’m practically humming. Tom’s battling a desperate, starving need, too. I’m not alone—he wants this. He wantsme.
I reach my fingers between us and find the button of my jeans. Tom is pressing open-mouthed kisses down my stomach, below my navel, and over my hip bone when he realizes I’ve nearly gotten my pants down to mid-thigh.
“Not tonight.”
“They won’t be back for an”—I sigh as his tongue traces low on my belly—“hour at least.”
Tom’s eyes burn when he pins them on me. “I’ll need far longer than that to do with you all the things I’d like.”
“Do them now,” I beg.
His blazing eyes don’t change, but he can’t hide that edge of a smile. “You’re going to have to learn a bit of patience.”
“I’m American,” I tell him, kicking my jeans off to reveal the floral thong with the bows underneath. “We’re big on instant gratification.”
Tom seems about to laugh again, but is distracted by my near nudity. His gaze gobbles up every inch of my skin. His hands skate up my thighs. “Jesus Christ.”
I tremble. “They’re just my legs.”
It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. Heaven help me when I open my mouth around this man.
“Nothing about you isjustanything.”
And I can see it in his eyes. That look of reverence, of worship. Of white-hot desire. He’s going to wring me out and make me beg. He’s a man who tortures himself—you can hearit in his music—he’s a glutton for punishment, for driving the edge of the knife deeper.
My eyes catch on his jeans, still sagging low beneath the line of his briefs…and I don’t think about it—I just push him onto his back and shimmy his jeans off. He’s laughing, and I know he could stop me easily—that he’s a mountain lion and I’m a flitting candy wrapper in the wind left behind by littering hikers—but he doesn’t. He lets me handle him and pull his limbs this way and that, and I’m laughing, too, at my sheer determination to get this man naked. I’d be ashamed if we weren’t having so much fun.
“Aha,” I say, a little out of breath when I succeed and Tom Halloran is lying beneath me, bare save for his black briefs and the brutal-looking bulge scarcely concealed beneath them.
“What shall you do with your hard-won victory?” The clear intent in his voice—the growlingrasp—tells me I haven’t won anything as much as he’s given himself to me.
It’s perverse, the way I eye him. He’s like a Greek god with his mythic hair and Adonis body and coarse beard. I can’t even look at his hands, or think about the tender way they caress my skin. I’ll pass out.
“Remember what I said about instant gratification?” I purr. “I’m going to show you what all the fuss is about.”
Twenty-Three
I sink down between his kneesand pull him from his underwear. My mouth goes dry at the sight of his cock. He’s huge, as I should have gathered, but still—it’s a shock. Warm, velvety, and so hard it looks sore. He wraps one hand around my upper arm, and when I take him between my palms, he squeezes me tightly. “Clementine.”
“Can I touch you?”
His nod is accompanied by a rugged exhale as I brush my fingers over his length once and watch him twitch. When I do it again the little bead of moisture at the tip of his cockhead drips down the side. One day, I am determined to make him beg as I did for him earlier, but not tonight. I’m too eager. After all these weeks of fleeting glances and chaste kisses and quiet yearning, I’m craving a version of him that’s wholly unrestrained.
I lower my head to lick him once, and feel his thigh tense below my hand. I brush my fingernails across the fine dark hairs there—strong and athletic. Legs I can imagine diving, bare, into a summer ocean. Hiking past gnarled trees…
I’m about to suck him into my mouth when it dawns on me—
