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“I'm not done,” I whisper hotly. The world around us is gray, but Laiken makes the colors saturated where we stand. “I want to see you smile, I want to see how gentle your face is while you sleep. I want to see every kind of face you're capable of making. I want you for so many reasons but right now, right this second? I've never ached so badly to see the way someone looks while I'm fucking them.”

She lets out a desperate moan. I move my grip to her neck, sliding up and feeling her pulse flickering beneath me. Her hair is heavy with water, her braid a mess, and I make it worse when I tangle my fingers in it. “I know you said nothing was going to happen between us,” I whisper. “You said that after our first kiss, you said it while wishing I would kiss you again in the kitchen, and you said it while I pet your beautiful pussy as I made you come in that ballgown. Are you going to say it now, here, when I can smell your juices even through the scent of the rain around us?”

“No,” she breathes out the word. “Dominic, I do want you. I've always wanted you, even before I knew what that word meant. I just didn't want the secrets.”

“Well right now, we have one less between us. Isn't that worth something?”

She focuses on my eyes, looking into them so hard, like she can read small words written on my irises. Water drops from her eyelashes careen down her round cheek. Standing on tiptoe, she presses herself on my chest, fingers wrapping in my soaked shirt, and she kisses me so hard that I feel our teeth come together.

“God, Laiken,” I mumble against her mouth. My tongue darts in a circle, chasing hers, pursuing it the way a hunter chases its prey. I want to kiss her and explore every crevice of her mouth. I want to count her teeth and her heart beats.

My arms wrap around her body, holding her to me like I can crush away all the mistakes I've already made.

I don't want to make anymore.

I know I still will.

- Chapter 23 -

Laiken

Euphoria wraps me inits warm embrace. I don't shake it off. I can't, or I'll realize I've come undone by the desperate words of a man I'm afraid to trust; someone in a mask who peels it back when he sees fit. Someone who thinks he can whisper sweet words, telling me he admires my strength, my candor, and my steadfast promises... all while he makes me break the one I made so recently.

I promised not to give in to him, not until I understood his wounds. Then I kissed him, and the promise unfurled until weaving it back into something solid became impossible.

“Dominic,” I whisper, tracing his name with my tongue. He pushes me under a canopy of thicker trees. The rain is reduced to erratic, occasional splashes here. That's good, but it's too late; I'm already overflowing.

“I love when you say my name.” He fans his hand on my jaw, forcing my head back into the tree bark. I see the orange leaves, the determined green pine needles above. His lips glide over my throat where he's stretched the skin tight to draw out the sensitivity. The sensation of his warm, wet tongue, moving ever so slow, makes my lungs squeeze. Hot flashes dart through my blood.

He blocks out my view of the foliage. He's taller than the trees, bigger than the world. “I need you so badly,” he says. Rain has turned his brown hair shiny, shaded it and the rest of him darker than ever. “Laiken, I've thought about this so many times. Every night, imagining it brought so much hurt... and then, when I realized itcouldhappen, it hurt even more.”

I'm light headed. I can't break his stare. “It doesn't have to hurt.”

He hesitates. “That's what I'm supposed to tell you.”

Pulled back to the reality of his hands on my cheeks, his body flattening me on the tree, I shiver. He went from discussing emotional pain to the literal one he might cause me by taking my virginity. “Dominic, I'm not scared of this. Not anymore.”