Page 39 of Claimed on the Ridge

I cross the kitchen. Every step is a choice. Every step is mine.

I stop in front of him. Close enough that the heat from his body reaches me through the flannel. Close enough that I have to look up to hold his gaze.

"I need to know one thing," he says. His voice has dropped into a register I've only heard once before, the night at the bar. "Are you walking toward me or away from someone else?"

The question stops me. I know the answer. What stops me is that no one has ever asked it.

"Toward you," I say. "Right now, toward you."

His hand comes up and finds the side of my jaw. His palm is rough and large enough that his fingers reach into my hair. He tilts my face up.

"There's something we need to talk about first," he says.

I almost laugh. The timing is absurd and exactly right. "Birth control."

"Yeah."

"I'm on the shot. I'm clean. I got tested right before I left Anchorage." The words come out flat and clinical, the way you discuss logistics before something that has nothing to do with logistics. "I haven't been with anyone since."

"I'm clean," Alex says. "It's been a while."

"Define a while."

"Long enough that I don't want to talk about it when I could be doing something else."

The half-smile that cracks his face lasts less than a second. Then his hand tightens in my hair and his mouth is on mine. The conversation is over.

He kisses the way he does everything, with his whole body committed. His other hand finds my hip and pulls me against him, and I can feel exactly how much he wants this through the denim between us.

I grab the front of his shirt because my knees are unreliable. His mouth is thorough and demanding and every wall I've built is coming down around me.

He pulls back just far enough that his mouth brushes mine when he speaks. "Upstairs."

He takes my hand and walks me to the staircase. We go up the steps to his room. He opens the door, pulls me inside, and the lock turns behind us. He turns me around and backs meagainst the door. Both hands on my jaw now, tilting my face, holding me exactly where he wants me.

"If something doesn't feel right, you say stop," he says. "I'll stop."

"I know. You stopped last time."

He kisses me again. Slower, deeper, with a control that makes it clear the pace is his. His hands move from my jaw down my neck, down the center of my body to the top button of the flannel. He unbuttons it one-handed without looking. Every button unhurried. He's watching my face while his fingers work, reading every reaction with total attention and zero mercy.

The flannel falls open. His hands slide inside, against my bare skin, and my breath catches hard enough that I hear it.

His thumb finds the edge of the bruise. Light enough that it doesn't hurt. He traces the line of it, slow, and then his mouth follows the path his thumb took.

"I hear you," I whisper. "Now stop being careful."

He takes me at my word. His hands stop tracing and start taking. He strips the flannel off my shoulders and his mouth drops to my throat, teeth and tongue, biting down where my neck meets my shoulder hard enough that I gasp. His tongue follows, slow and hot over the mark he just left, and the spike of heat between my legs is immediate.

His hands close over my breasts through the bra, and even through the fabric his grip is rough enough that my breath catches. His thumbs find my nipples and drag across them until they harden under the pressure. My hips roll against him on instinct.

"That's it," he says against my collarbone. "Don't hold back."

He pins me against the door with his hips. The hard length of him presses against me through his jeans and the friction hits me right where I need it. I grind into him before I can thinkabout it. He lets me. His eyes stay on mine the entire time. His jaw is tight and the heat in his face is controlled and savage.

One hand slides down my ribs, over my hip, and grips the back of my thigh. He pulls my leg up against his side, opening me wider, changing the angle so the pressure of him lands exactly where the ache is worst. I make a noise against his neck that I've never heard from my own mouth.

"Louder," he says. "I want to hear you."