Page 127 of Just One More Thing

I stop caring about composure entirely.

A low sound escapes him, rough and quiet.

His mouth presses against the spot between my neck and shoulder before working its way back up to mine.

He walks me backward without breaking the kiss.

The backs of my knees hit the bed.

Jake lowers me onto it carefully and braces himself above me. Then he pulls back just enough to look at me in the dim moonlight coming through the windows.

“Hi,” he says softly.

“Hi,” I whisper.

He kisses me again, slower this time. Deep enough that my fingers curl into his shoulders. Then his mouth starts traveling downward with the same thoroughness he applies to everything else in his life, like there is nowhere else he needs to be and nothing more important than paying attention to me.

I’ve been kissed before. I’ve been wanted before.

But I have never in my life felt this seen.

“You’re everything,” he murmurs against my skin, and it’s so simple and so direct and so Jake that I feel it everywhere.

His hands settle at my hips as his mouth moves lower, and I stop trying to keep track of what either one is doing because his attention is a full sensory experience and I have been catastrophically underprepared for it.

He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my shorts and pulls them down. I help him because my hips have made their position on patience very clear.

He laughs quietly against my skin at that, warm and low, and then his mouth follows the path his hands just took, and I stop being capable of coherent thought altogether.

I decide I have no complaints about Jake’s thoroughness. None. Zero. I retract every impatient thing I have ever thought about this man.

He takes me right to the edge of unraveling with his mouth.

I reach for him, pulling him back up to me. He settles against me.

He moves slowly at first.

“Jake,” I breathe, “go slow and I’ll spend all night edging you.”

He laughs softly against my neck. “That so.”

I wrap a leg around him. “Try me.”

He takes the instruction.

I press the back of my hand against my mouth because the alternative is saying something deeply embarrassing at volume.

Jake catches my wrist gently and pulls my hand away. “You don’t have to do that.”

“What?”

“Be quiet.”

The look he gives me when he says it nearly finishes me off.

I move my hand.

And when we finally close the last distance between us, I am absolutely not quiet.