Page 56 of Sweet as Sin (Bad Habit 1)
“Hey.” He rolled to his side, lifted to his elbow, propped his head on his hand. He stared down at me with hooded eyes, his expression unreadable. Our bodies were mere inches apart, so close I felt the heat radiating from him.
I became acutely aware that the two of us were half naked. Beneath the thick white towel wrapped around me, I wore nothing at all.
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “How long have you been there?”
“A while.” He reached up and brushed a strand of damp hair from my forehead. “Feelin’ any better?”
I inhaled and stretched my legs, assessing, then nodded. “Yeah. Headache’s gone.”
“Good.” He trailed his fingers over my brow, across my cheek, down my neck. His hand lingered over my collarbone. He began to toy with the chain around my neck. Watching it instead of me, he asked, “And how ’bout that nasty urge to bury a knife in my chest? That gone, too?”
Busted. I sighed, embarrassed and annoyed all over again. “Was I that obvious?”
Nico traced his fingers over my chest, moving from my neck to my shoulders, along the top of my cleavage where the towel was cinched, up the line of my throat. Everywhere he touched, it felt like he left a trail of sparks. My breath hitched at the sensation.
“Told you the first day I met you, baby: you lie for shit.”
He began to work the seam of the towel open where it was folded over on my chest. His fingers deftly pulled the two ends apart until the space between my breasts was exposed. He left it like that, open but not revealing more than a narrow strip of skin, and trailed his fingers lower. I was sure he’d be able to feel the jackhammer wreaking havoc inside my chest.
When I spoke, my voice was shaky. “I’m sorry for getting mad—”
“Don’t be.”
Nico’s hand moved lower, then lower still, pushing the opposite sides of the towel aside to gain access to my bare stomach. My breasts were still mostly covered, as were my girly bits down below, but the rest of my skin was now exposed from my neck to beneath my belly button.
Several parts of my body began to tingle in the most fantastic way. When Nico swirled his fingertip around and around my belly button, then dipped it gently in, I had to bite my lip to stop from moaning.
“Don’t be sorry for gettin’ mad, Kat.” His gaze flashed to mine. “Be sorry for lyin’ to me. And don’t ever do it again.” He leaned in and rubbed his cheek against mine, nosing aside my hair to breathe into my ear. “You hear me?”
My unsteady exhalation would have to serve as an affirmative, because I found myself not fully in command of my ability to speak.
Warm and wet and wonderful, his tongue skimmed the rim of my ear. His teeth lightly pressed down on my earlobe, and he sucked it into his mouth. On my stomach, his big hand spread open. More tingling and sparks spread in its wake.
Lost in sensation, I closed my eyes.
Nico pushed the towel over the slope of my hips. Cool air brushed over my breasts and thighs, and I knew I was fully exposed to him. Curiously, I didn’t feel shy. In fact, I was strongly fighting the urge to wantonly spread my legs and point to my crotch, shouting, “Eat that goddamn cookie!”
What a slut.
And—far worse—what a pushover. You’d think I’d been living in a convent for the last ten years, I was so horny. What the hell had he done with my resolve?
“Say it, baby,” he whispered in my ear. His hand drifted south over my belly. “Tell me you won’t ever lie to your man again.”
Was it ridiculous, the sheer thrill I felt at Nico calling himself my man? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. All I knew was where I wanted his clever fingers to go. And that I’d do pretty much anything to get them there.
“Yes. Yes. I mean, no. Both. Whichever. I won’t.”
God, I was pathetic.
He pinched the flesh of my upper thigh, then stroked the sting away. His fingers drifted dangerously close to home base. “You won’t what?”
His voice had grown hard. He leaned into me and sucked one of my nipples into his mouth. I gasped, arching against him. His tongue swirled around and around my nipple as his finger had around my belly button. Feeling as liquid as a tub of butter left out under the summer sun, I shuddered. “Ah . . . I sort of . . . forgot the question.”
“C’mon, now, baby, you can do better than that,” he chided, chuckling. He moved to my other nipple, lavished it with the same attention the first had received, laughing softly again when I squirmed, no longer able to hold back my groan of pleasure.
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“I won’t lie to you. I won’t. I won’t . . . oh, God. Please don’t stop doing that!”
