Page 55 of The Sun & Her Burn

Her eyes widened almost comically, the sunlight catching the pupils and turning them to amethysts.

“What?” she breathed, her hand spasming against my cheek.

I held her tighter against my face with one hand while the other reached up to tunnel under her heavy, damp hair so I could palm the expanse of her neck. Her pulse throbbed under my thumb.

“I have not wanted this badly in years,” I admitted, my accent thicker than it should be, so I gave in to the Italian bubbling up from my gut. “Quando ti guardo, ti voglio. When I think of you, I want you.”

Linnea’s shaky exhale warmed my mouth. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t have anything left of my heart to give,” I confessed, even as I dropped her wrist to swipe a thumb over her plush lower lip. “If I did, I would have asked you to take it.”

“Sebastian,” she breathed, tipping her face closer, a flower seeking the light.

And I had always had a weakness for flowers, for beautiful things needing warmth and love to grow because I was the very same way.

So I lowered my mouth and met her halfway.

The first brush of our lips was suede against suede, such a soft slide I almost couldn’t feel her.

That would not do.

A soft growl worked loose from my throat, and I used the hand on her neck to press her more deeply into me, angled so Icould swipe my tongue along the seam of her lips and taste the cavern of her mouth.

Warm, wet, and flavoured like the sea.

I groaned, or she did, before our tongues were sliding hotly against each other, curving and rubbing and tasting every inch available to us.

I was so hard so suddenly that it hurt, my cock an iron pole down the leg of the grey sweatpants I’d changed into, only a thin cotton barrier between it and the hand Linnea had planted on my thigh to lean closer.

Rational thought fled like a gazelle chased by a predator until I felt more animal than man. I moved the hand on the base of Linnea’s neck up into the damp, silken strands at the base of her skull and fisted my fingers, tugging her head back so I could plunder her more deeply.

Her moan shivered from her tongue to mine, and I swallowed it down.

I wanted to undo the strings of the wet bikini she still wore and lick the sea salt off her heavy breasts until her nipples puckered and reddened. I wanted to suck marks into her long, golden neck and rub stubble burn in the valley of her chest like a map of everywhere I’d touched. I wanted to fix my teeth to the curve of her shoulder and bite hard enough to bruise.

And I wanted Adam to see it all.

To know I wanted her, I’d had her, some part of her wasmine.

But also, that some part of her could be his.

That some part of me had been and would always be his as well.

What the two of us could do to this golden girl in the velvet fold of night, when the outside world faded away and sins could flourish like creatures in the dark.

“You’re intoxicating,” I told her, before sucking her full bottom lip between my teeth.

“So are you,” she said instantly, pressing even deeper into me so that she was almost straddling the console, one knee on my thigh, her hard nipples rubbing against my chest. “I could get drunk off this. Off you.”

I pulled her head back with a sharp little pull that made her mouth fall open on a gasp, showcasing kiss-swollen lips and flushed cheeks. Her eyes fluttered open, revealing blown pupils that spoke even more eloquently than her words.

She wanted me.

Did that make this so much better or worse?

Before I could decide, there was a loud bang from outside the car.

Like guilty teenagers caught necking after curfew, Linnea and I sprang apart. She fell ungracefully into her seat, her long legs akimbo, so that when the passenger door suddenly opened, she fell out backward first.