Page 26 of Give In to Me
“You can visit me in the dorm.”
His mouth was at her ear. “Not when I want to do this.”
His hand found hers. He pulled her through the gate and up the porch steps and through the front door of a stone house with blue shutters in New York that he’d bought for her, and the door closed behind them and he turned her against it.
His mouth on hers. Not gentle. Not tentative. A kiss that saidI flew three thousand miles and bought a house and sat across from my brother for the first time in my life, and all of it, every piece of it, was to get to this door with you behind it.His hands slid into her hair and cradled her skull and he kissed her with a thoroughness that left no room for thought, and she kissed him back, and her hands found his chest and the buttons of his shirt and the warm skin underneath, and he made a sound against her mouth, low, from somewhere deep, and the sound went through her like a current.
He lifted her. Her legs went around his waist and her back was against the door and his mouth was on her throat, the spot he’d discovered in a garden in Los Angeles a lifetime ago, and her fingers were in his hair and she was saying his name, not thinking about it, just saying it,Julian, Julian, and each time she said it his grip tightened and his mouth moved lower.
He carried her. Through the house she hadn’t seen, past rooms she’d explore tomorrow, to a bedroom where the late afternoon light came through the windows in gold bars and the bed was made with white sheets that someone had chosen for this exact moment, and he set her down on the edge and knelt.
Knelt. At the foot of the bed. His hands on her knees, his face tipped up toward her, and his expression, the openness, the hunger, the devotion, was so raw that she touched his face, her palm against his cheek, and he turned into her hand and closed his eyes and stayed there, breathing, his lips against her palm.
“Let me,” he said against her skin. “Please.”
She nodded. Couldn’t speak. Her heart was in her throat and her blood was singing and his hands were sliding up her thighs, gentle, careful, pausing at the hem of her dress, his thumbs tracing circles on her skin that sent heat spiraling through her center.
He took his time. He pushed her dress up over her hips with a reverence that made her eyes sting, and the way he was touching her, kissing her, had Katy gripping the sheets, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls.
With every second that passed, he was learning what she wanted, what drove her crazy, and she could only say his name one more time—Julian—before pleasure broke over her like a door flung open onto a room she hadn’t known existed.
She came down slowly, and she ran her fingers through his hair, knowing what it had cost him to give that to her without taking anything for himself.
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark and bright and his mouth was wet and he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.
“Come here,” she whispered.
He rose. Climbed onto the bed beside her and gathered her into his arms and she buried her face in his chest and listened to his heartbeat, fast and strong and hers.
Katy closed her eyes as Julian’s arms tightened around her.
I love you.
She didn’t say the words out loud, but it was as if he had heard her, with his lips touching her forehead.
I love you.
~ The End ~
Come Here
Chapter 1
MY FINGER TRACES THEsame circle it always does.
Small, unhurried, moving along the margin of my notebook while Professor Salvatore’s voice fills the lecture hall like smoke. Low, accented, a voice that makes two hundred students go quiet before he’s finished his first sentence. I don’t have to look up to know every woman in this room has gone still. I went still around this man two years ago and never quite figured out how to move again.
The circle widens. Tightens. Widens.
He’s talking about network security today. How systems protect their most valuable assets by layering defenses, creating barriers between what matters and what wants to get in. I should be taking notes. I’m taking notes, somewhere in the other half of my brain, the half that hasn’t been hijacked by the way his sleeves are rolled to the elbow and there’s a vein running along his forearm that I’ve been privately, mortifyingly aware of since September of my freshman year.
Two years. I’ve been quietly, hopelessly gone for this man for two years.
It’s not a crush. Crushes are what happened to me in seventh grade when Tommy Muldoon smiled at me during the hayride and I walked into a fence post. This is something else entirely. Something with roots and weather patterns and a permanence that alarms me when I think about it too directly, so I mostly don’t. I just sit in the third row every Tuesday and Thursday,draw my circles, and let his voice do what it does to the space between my ribs.
Nobody knows. Not David, who saves me a seat every lecture and has opinions about my coffee order. Not my parents, who call every Sunday after church and would probably sell the other tractor if they thought it’d help. Not even the cluster of women who trail Professor Salvatore around campus with their hungry eyes and lip gloss, the ones who show up to his lectures in heels and leave looking faintly devastated when he doesn’t glance their way.
I don’t wear heels. I wear a cotton dress my mother hemmed for me last Christmas, with small blue flowers on it, and flats that have seen better days. I sit in the third row because I got here early on the first day of freshman year and the habit stuck. I draw my circles and keep my hopeless, embarrassing, absolutely futile feelings to myself, because I’m Elsa Lively from Nebraska, and he’s Professor Luciano Salvatore, and the distance between those two facts is roughly the same as the distance between my parents’ cornfield and the moon.
