Page 135 of Dove
As he situated the Suburban off to the side and parked, I noticed the back of his truck was occupied by a makeshift bedcompiled of comfy looking pillows and blankets, a basket waiting on its opened tailgate.
“Josh, what…” I was truly speechless. Nothing could have prepared me for this. This wasn’t a quickly thought up idea to apologize for what had happened earlier. No, he’dplannedthis. “How?”
I’d been with him all day, first doing chores and then at the festival. He’d had some time in between, but there was no way he’d pulled all this off in that small amount of time, at least not without me noticing.
Josh cut the gentle rumble of the car’s engine with the turn of his key, but instead of silence enveloping us this time, it was filled with the sound of my beating heart mingled with the muted hum of the forest around us.
“I might have had some help.” He unclicked his seat belt and set his keys in a cupholder between us.
The way he said it…
“Reverie?” I guessed. There was only one person I could think of that he trusted well enough to ask and wasjustcrazy enough to pull something like this off. I always joked that if she hadn’t gone the route of beautifying people’s hair, she could have beautified people’s homes. Rev just had an eye for those things, for atmosphere and aesthetics. She’d made her small bedroom growing up look like a picture out of a magazine, and when she’d facetimed me to see her apartment in L.A, I swear it looked like a picture taken straight from someone’s Pinterest board.
He grinned sheepishly. “She was the only person I could think to ask.” His unsaid words hung between us.Because no one else knows.
“How did you find out…”that I told her, I didn’t say.
He threw me an amused look. “Are you kidding me? There was no chance in hell that girl didn’t know. You two have beentelling each other everything since the moment you met. Thick as thieves and twice as cunning, the two of you. You never mentioned telling her, but,” he shrugged, “I figured you did.”
His words didn’t hold any judgement or anger, but still a part of me prickled with guilt.
“I’m—”
“Don’t,” he interrupted. “Don’t apologize. I’m a lot less worried about people finding out about us than you are, sweetheart. So obviously if she knows, I know you trust her with that information, which means I trust her, too.”
My eyes burned hot with tears, moved by his sweet words, and the impulse to kiss him was too overwhelming to ignore. My body pitched forward only to be forcibly stopped, held back abruptly by the seat belt that tightened across my chest, sensing the need to protect me from my eager, too-fast movements. Josh barked out a laugh as I grumbled, embarrassed, cursing the damn thing as I leaned back into my seat and unfastened it.
Before I could twist to face him again, his hand skimmed across the side of my neck, rousing tingles beneath his touch as his fingers found their way into my hair. His large palm warmed the curve of my jaw, and he used it to guide my head until I was looking at him. I blinked at how close he was now, leaning over the center console, his face only inches from mine.
“Was this what you wanted?” his voice was a deep, amused rasp, and I shivered, his words like invisible fingertips teasing over my body, coaxing a reaction out of me. He stole my answer with a press of his lips to mine; first soft and tender, unbearably sweet, until it wasn’t. Until he tilted my head with his hand, angling our lips so they slotted together perfectly, turning that gentle kiss into less of a give and more of a take.
The fingers along the back of my head tightened, threading deeper into my hair as he urged me closer, until I was meeting him halfway over the console. He nipped at my bottom lip thenimmediately soothed it with his tongue, licking at the seam of my lips until they opened for him. That quick jolt of pain shot a path downwards, until I was squirming in my seat, pressing my thighs tighter together to relieve the pressure growing between them.
Our kiss was a catalyst, jump starting us to exactly where we’d left off in that alley. Even the simplest of touch, his hand in my hair, his blunt fingernails scraping delectably at my scalp as he maneuvered me where he wanted me, had my body lighting back up as if we’d never stopped. Every pull of air into my lungs between his ravaging kisses came shallower and shallower, leaving me lightheaded and dizzy. Or maybe that was what Josh was doing with his tongue.
My fingers twitched in my lap, curling and uncurling, until finally I allowed them to reach out and touch him—touch him like I’ve wanted to touch him all day, like how I’d been ready and willing to back in that alley if he hadn’t stopped me. But once again, the moment my hands slide down his chest and flirt their way toward his waistband, he pulled back, his chest heaving with deep inhales that sent a surge of want through me so powerful I shook from it.
I did that to him, I thought headily.Just from a kiss.
“No,” I whimpered out as he removed his hand from my hair, careful not to catch or pull on the strands entangled in his grip. “Please.”
He caught my hands in his as they reached out to pull him back in, then laid his forehead against mine. For a moment, we caught our breath together, staring into each other’s eyes. In that moment that seemed to span a lifetime, our heartbeats synchronized, and I realized I was so deep in love with this man there was no way I was crawling out of it. Not that I ever wanted to. My love for Josh was a well I’d gladly fallen into, even when he’d never known I was drowning in its depths. Staring backat me, his dark eyes were even darker with want, and perhaps something else, something deeper and far more meaningful. I wondered if he saw it mirrored back in mine.
“Dove,” my name whispered from his lips had heat curling low in my stomach. “I’d love nothing more than to keep going, but the last thing I want to do is rush this.” His hands encircled my wrists, his thumbs swiping back and forth over my fluttering pulse. “We have all night.”
He brought one of my wrists up to his mouth, pressing a lingering kiss to it, his eyes locked on mine. Before the wordsmaybe I want to rush thisfell out of my mouth, he was gone, the interior lights illuminating the space and jolting me out of the moment as he opened his door and slammed it shut behind him. With a frustrated groan my hands dropped back into my lap as he rounded the front of the car, striding toward my side so he could help me out.
I ran my hands through my hair and hoped it didn’t look too disheveled given everything it had been through in the last hour. How many times were going to start this only to stop?
“You know, I’m really not into edging,” I informed him as he held my door open for me and I slid out of the SUV, stepping down into the slightly overgrown grass. I made a mental note that one of us should come down here and mow soon.
The laugh that punched out of him sounded half amused and half surprised. “And you know about edging how?”
I lifted my shoulder in a half shrug and let my sly smirk speak for itself, reminding him I wasn’t that same inexperienced girl he left behind. Maybe not wholly experienced, admittedly, but enough to tease him. His dark eyes sparkled a golden color in the waning light, the color of raw honey and just as sweet. With the rays of the setting sun peeking through the tops of the trees, it only succeeded in making him look even more deliciously tempting.
I turned away, because looking at him did nothing to quell the need that coursed through me, creating a deep throb that had me pressing my thighs together subtly to alleviate it.
“Maybe you just haven’t been edged properly,” he purred in my ear, crowding up against my back as he shut the car door with a muted thud. The confident step I’d been taking away from him faltered as my foot teetered on a rock and my ankle rolled.
