Page 50 of Stay With Me

And looked, and looked, and looked.

He kept looking until she stepped closer and stood between his knees while holding his shoulders. “You can touch too, Nick. That’s also sort of the point.”

He darted a glance at her face, a bit at a loss for words, then let his face fall forward and bury into her cleavage while he placed his hands at the top of her hips, skimming them in large circles up and down her thighs.

He’d been craving this moment since the first time he’d touched her three months prior. Her skin was softer than he’d remembered, and he couldn’t stop himself from uttering an intensely satisfied groan.

“Iloveyour skin,” he muttered through a cleavage-muffled voice.

She giggled wildly, which caused him to lift his head up and look her in the eyes. “You know we’re not quite at the twentieth date yet, right?”

“I know.”

“What changed your mind?”

She shrugged as she reached for his shirt and began unbuttoning. “Well, I love you. And I know you love me too, and we have a good relationship so continuing to wait for an arbitrary number of dates seems silly. Don’t you think?”

He smiled.

They always figure it out first.

“How do you know I love you?” he asked coyly.

She gave him a tiny shove before slipping his shirt off. “Because. After your little accident, you became a totally different guy and started respecting my boundaries like I asked. And I’m the person you want to talk to every night before you go to bed. You randomly swing by here just to say hi.And you’re always giving me that look.”

“What look is that?”

She climbed onto his lap and pressed their foreheads together. “The one that makes me feel like the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen.”

“Well, you are the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.” He paused mischievously. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean I love you.”

She scoffed and gave him another shove. “You are so contrary.”

“And you love it. Because you love me.”

“Well, I’d have to love you to put up with your snarky comments.”

He snickered as he lifted her up bridal style, and plopped her down on the bed, then rested on his elbows, hovering right above her face. He rubbed his thumbs across her cheeks and spoke in a soft voice.

“I do love you, Sammie.”

“See?” she said in her brand of snark. “Told you so.”

With that, the cute, baby blue lingerie came off, as well as his remaining clothes, and he’d crawled under the sheet, poising himself above her, clutching one of her hands and stroking her hair with the other. He found himself hesitating. The whole thing felt kind of reverent. He wasn’t ignorant as to why it felt that way.

He did love Sammie and this definitely felt like a first of several different kinds. All of it was a new phenomenon for him, and one he was pretty stoked about so he couldn’t help smiling as he kissed his way down her neck.

Eventually, they moved in unison, and as he continued to allow his hands and lips to travel over her skin, he became more and more intoxicated. Intoxicated by not only the softness of her skin under his fingertips but of every facet that made up this amazing woman who’d come to mean so much to him in such a short period of time.

His intoxicated state caused the words she spoke breathlessly into his ear to sound incoherent, but he knew what she meant, and he said them back.

“I love you, too.”

Before long, her face was buried in the crook of his neck, fingertips anchoring into the muscles of his back until the blissful moment when she gasped his name and her core trembled around him. He held her as close as he could while he reached his own explosive peak, finally collapsing on the bed next to her, as his face rested comfortably below her chin.

And maybe it was because he’d never been on such a long hiatus from sex, or perhaps because he was completely love-drunk right then, but his eyelids suddenly weighed ten thousand pounds and he was on the verge of passing out.

He wasn’t sure if Sammie had any ground rules about waiting to sleep over so he managed to mutter a request for permission.