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He jumped to his feet. Given his sudden tenseness, she’d anticipated his rage. What she hadn’t prepared for was him moving toward her in three ground-covering strides and enfolding her in a crushing embrace. “Oh God, Charlee. You’ve lived that nightmare since you were eighteen?”

His arms pinned hers at her sides, and his face pressed into her neck. A warm, low crackling fire kindled in her core and spread through her body. Roy had never held her that way, which meant he hadn’t stolen her capacity to trust hugs, and return them.

“Since I was sixteen. Nine years ago.” She held her breath, the explanation sticking in her throat. She steeled her spine against the images of memory. Nathan told her rape victims blamed themselves, but she wasn’t a victim. “He imprisoned me for two years.” A smile twitched her lips as she recalled her proudest moment. “I escaped on my own that first time.”

When he raised his head, she wanted to wrap her arms around him and squeeze him as tightly as he squeezed her. Since she couldn’t do that, she held firmly to his eyes. Their brown depths were murky, but the emotions swimming in the deepest parts begged for answers, for help, and for things she didn’t want to address.

He saved her from the painful questioning. “Are you okay?” His breath pushed against her lips. “Can I hold you like this?”

Life was jaded like that, throwing them together when he couldn’t tolerate affection and she was desperate for it. “Yes. I really like it.”

He dropped his forehead to hers. “Thank God, because—” A shuddering inhale. “This is going to sound really forward, Charlee, but I want to kiss you. I’ve dreamed of it for three years. I’ve enacted it in my head so many times.” He straightened. “Jesus, I sound creepy.”

Creepy? Maybe a little. It was a harmless creepy. His hard body pressed against the length of hers. Not a forceful weight. Instead, it propped her up, supported her. “A fantasy, huh? I can’t compete with that.”

He removed his hands from her back, cupped her neck, and slowly tilted her head back. “Let me show you.”

The first kiss touched the hairline at her temple, and the muscles in her face relaxed. The next brushed her eyelid. She smiled, remembering the way his had twitched under her fingers the night before.

A kiss landed on the corner of her smile. More trailed along her cheek to the spot below her ear, and he lingered there with nipping lips.

She laughed and buried her ear in the crook of her shoulder.

“Tickles?”

“You’re a tease. I thought you were going to kiss me?”

He stared at her mouth, his own parted with increased breath. His chest rose and fell, moving against hers. When his tongue wet the top corner of his lip, she felt it on her skin from her lips to her toes.

“Jay—”

He swooped in and took her mouth. It began with a sip, then nibbles, a little at a time. Soon he was sucking every inch of her lips, sending the beat of her heart spluttering through her veins.

She fell into a trance, yet she could mark every perfect second of his mouth opening hers, and the precise moment their tongues touched.

Oh, to run her fingers through his hair, or over his ribs and around to the rise of his backside. As it were, her hands were useless weights hanging on her thighs. She didn’t want to move them, afraid she’d startle him and ruin the moment.

He seemed to sense her distraction and joined their fingers without breaking the kiss.

She pulled on their hands to bring them around to her back, but he tugged them the opposite direction, over his hips, and settled them with the backs of his hands over his ass. The position brought their hips together, and she felt the strength of his arousal at her belly.

“Is this too much?” he breathed against her lips.

She arched into him and chased his tongue, entangling it with hers. She moved to his bottom lip, drawing it in, tasting it, and slowly let it go. “Not enough.”

Beneath the solid rock of his chest and arms, she felt him shaking. With restraint? Anticipation? She rose on tiptoes to deepen her strokes, leaning into him, bolstered by the musculature of his body.

They began to gasp for air, and the roll of their tongues slowed. The intensity faded into lazy doting licks and the wet slide of swollen lips. When their breathing returned to normal, she dropped her heels to the floor and searched his eyes. “How did reality stand up?”

“Incomparable.” His eyes glimmered. “The fantasy was an opening act. You just flattened me with a show-stealing encore. I’m ruined for all other performances.”

Her pulse fluttered in that girly draw-hearts-around-his-name kind of way. Was she an idiot? She needed to pull up before she drowned. “I was hoping for a more explicit answer.”

His dark eyebrows crept together, and he tugged her closer by her hands held at his back. “I was one thrust against your cunt away from busting a nut. That explicit enough for you?”

The lewdness of his words stiffened her spine. She asked for it, deliberately forced the sentiment from the moment. Emotional distance was safer for them both. So why did she feel so sick?

“Shit. I’m sorry, Charlee. I shouldn’t have said that.”