Page 51 of Pin My Alpha
“Yes.”
“Tell me if that changes.”
He pulls back just enough to give me a look. “I said yes, didn’t I?”
“Okay.”
He shoves my shoulder, but there’s no real force behind it. “You’re impossible.”
“You’re the one who built a nest out of my laundry.”
“You’re lucky that’s all I did.” He says it with a sharp little smile, and then he grabs the hem of the Henley and pulls it over his head.
My breath catches. I’ve seen him naked before, but this is different. He isn’t putting on a show. He isn’t trying to shock me first. He’s just standing there in the low light from the hallway, watching my face.
The lines of his body are lean and strong, and my gaze snags on the hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse is jumping. That one small detail feels more intimate than anything else.
My hands are shaking a little when I reach out and put them on his waist. The size of them against him—my palms spanning nearly the whole width of him—sends a dark pulse of want straight through my gut.
Shay’s eyes flick down to my fingers, then back to my face. “Are you nervous?”
“Terrified.”
His eyebrows lift. “Really? Why?”
Because I can handle a rent increase or a busted tap line, but I don’t know what the hell I’d do if I hurt you.
“Because I want to get this right,” I say instead.
His face softens, the guarded set of his mouth easing for just a second. “You don’t have to get it right,” he says, his voice quiet. “You just have to be here.”
That hits me harder than it should. I kiss him before he can see it on my face.
My hands move over him slowly, learning the things I’ve only seen in flashes. The pale, silvery line of a scar low on his ribs. The way his body shivers when my thumbs find the sharp points of his hips. I drag my beard over his stomach just to hear the hitch in his breath.
“Declan,” he says, and it’s not a word, it’s a sound.
“I’m here.”
I guide him backward until the backs of his knees hit the bed, and he sits in the middle of the rumpled heap of my shirts. He looks down at it, and his jaw tightens.
“It doesn’t mean—” he starts.
“Shay.”
His mouth snaps shut.
I kneel on the floor between his thighs, spreading them with my hands. He’s already slick, a wet gleam at the top of his ass, his scent so thick in the air I can barely think. This close, the difference between us is impossible to ignore—my shoulders blocking out the lamp light, my hands nearly covering his thighs.
“Look at you,” I murmur. “Spread out in my clothes like you belong here.”
His eyes immediately flick away. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m some… thing you finally get to have.”
I almost laugh. “No.” My hand settles on his thigh, a grounding weight. “Like I still can’t believe you’re letting me.”
