He dips in to give me a light kiss. “Romantic walk, is it?”
I nod, very seriously, holding back from grabbing his neck and kissing the dickens out of him. “I want to try it. I’ve always told Em how I’m not romantic at all.”
Julian squeezes my hand. “Rubbish.”
Our bare toes squish the cold sand, and the waves sound on the shore, threatening to come up high enough to get our feet wet. The atmosphere has turned gray black blue purple—both the sky and the ocean—except the sea has bits of white foam, and it smells like salt and seaweed and fish and more salt.
And I feel this sense of joy. Tremendous joy.
It makes me take off running, pulling him with me.
We’re holding hands, laughing, running as fast as we can. Thankfully, this part of the beach has little debris, just soft sand. We leap and whoop andrun run rununtil we’re panting and out of breath.
“Shit,” Julian gasps, when we stop behind some dunes.
I tug him close so we bump into each other—chest to chest, pelvis to pelvis—and I take his other hand. Our skin is hot from exertion. I embrace him, holding both his hands behind his back, and kiss his neck. He tenses at first, then relaxes against me. “There’s no one around,” I tell him. “No one for miles that way.” It’s hard to indicate west over the ocean with my eyes while I’m sucking on his skin, but I think he gets the point… if his moan is any indication. “Even if someone is around, they can’t see us, because it’s so dark.”
“No one to see me do this,” he mutters against my ear. In an instant, I’m lowered to my back in the cool sand, his elbows on either side of my head. Jules hovers over me, his thighs between my legs and his lips on mine.
I groan. It’sso good.
That kiss is the moment a match strikes. When it pauses and you wonder if it’s going to catch. The split second before the flame gets going, burning bright.
The kiss starts tame but ignites my body in a flash. It’s a deep, salty, hot kiss. A kiss with tongue. A kiss with heart.
I push him over and straddle him, my knees digging into the sand. “We’re going to get messy, and I don’t care. I just want you.”
He holds me to him, then whispers in my ear, “You’re getting in my bloodstream, Sam.”
“And you’re in mine,” I whisper back.
Julian kisses me so hard we’re panting, then leans back so I can see his dark eyes studying me in the moonlight. “I’m so fucking enamored with you, I don’t know what to do with myself.”
His words hit me in the soul and make me tingle in ways that have nothing to do with his kissing and his touch.
His next words are quiet. “The strength of my feelings scares me.”
“I feel the same way,” I admit, my fingers tangled in his hair, my cock straining at my zipper.
His hands knead my ass. “Yeah? You do?”
“I do.”
“Christ. What am I going to do with you?”
“When you use that tone of voice, you always make me hard.” I angle my hips to rub his cock with mine. “Correction. Harder.”
“Do I really?” His tone isn’t mocking, but it isn’t light either. More… curious. “You always make me hard. From the moment we met.”
I bury my face in his neck. “Sorry again about that.”
“No more apologies. I enjoyed your office hand job. It got us here.”
He lifts up and cradles my chin.
Our next deep kiss burns that match to the end and sets the world on fire.
And then we can’t get our hands on each other fast enough. I’m scrambling, shoving his shirt up, throwing mine off, so that we’re skin to skin, both kneeling now. I rub his cock through his shorts.