Page 93 of Take Me Home

“Where’s your family?”

He scratched his eyebrow. “We probably passed them coming out of your dad’s place. They took the kids to see the lights.”

She huffed a laugh, which grew into a full fit, hovering right on the edge of something else. Tears leaked down her face, but through manic giggles, she assured him, “I’m not crying. It’s just so ridiculous.” She stepped out of the car and tried to sling her bag over her shoulder, but she dropped it with a hiss and sucked her palm.

Ash picked up her bag then ushered her into the house, straight up to his room, where she sat on the bed, holding her injured hand in her lap.

He turned on the bedside lamp. “Let me look.”

The cut wasn’t very deep and had stopped bleeding. Still, he rose to fetch supplies from the bathroom.

She caught his shirt. “I’ll live.”

“There could be glass in it.”

“There isn’t.”

She pulled him down beside her on the bed. And then she was kissing him with the same urgency and desperation as her getaway from the disastrous party, her uninjured hand delving into his hair, tongue probing into his mouth. For a moment, it was all he could do to keep up. He braced a hand at her hip, but she took it as an invitation to scoot into his lap, her stretchyskirt riding up her thighs. When he tried to kiss her more gently, she deepened it.

“Hold on,” he breathed. At her father’s house, she’d told him to get his ornaments, or he’d never see them again, and only now did he realize what she’d meant. She didn’t intend to go back. She was running.

But she wasn’t running fromhim.

He wanted to fix everything, patch up every injury, seen and unseen. He wanted to kiss every hurt. And then he wanted to put his mouth on all the places that might make her feel better, feel good. He couldn’t parse the parts of him that wanted to soothe her from the parts that wanted to do these far less tender, far less noble things.

With an impatient huff, she grasped his jaw to kiss him again. “Be with me.”

“I am.”

He shifted her off his lap, and she stood in front of him, brows furrowed as if to say,Then why’d you just dump me out of your lap?

Standing, he asked, “What do you want, Haze?” He peeled his blazer down off her shoulders, ducking to kiss her neck.

She exhaled a relieved sigh. “That’s good.”

“Yeah?” He gathered her hair back and gently tipped her jaw to the side for better access. “Do you want gentle?” He brushed his lips featherlight across her throat to the other side. “Or something with a little more…” He gave her a bite that made her squirm, then quickly soothed the spot with his tongue.

“Do I have to pick one?” she breathed, tugging his hips closer.

He smiled against her neck, fingers finding her shirt buttons. “No. You can have everything you want.”

“What do you want?” she countered.

He didn’t miss the evasion or the blush coloring her cheeks.She wasn’t there yet. So, he didn’t press. He started undoing her buttons. “Want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“I want to touch more of you than I did in the barn.”

She yanked her blouse from the waistband of her skirt, then reached for the zipper at the side.

“Wait.” He stilled her hips, slid his palms down over the sleek, stretchy material. He smoothed them down the outsides of her thighs until he reached the hem above her knees, flirted with the skin there, swiping his fingertips just under the fabric. “I’ve thought about this. A lot.”

He lowered to his knees, and her eyes went inky black. “Thought about what?”

This wasn’t the way he’d intended this to go, with him confessing his own fantasies to her instead of discovering hers, but now that he was here, he wanted to say it, and he was starting to think, from her labored, shallow breaths, that maybe hearing what he wanted worked for her, too. Slowly, he pushed her skirt up a few inches, pausing to look up at her. “Can I—”

She nodded emphatically.