A Blazing Little Christmas(44)
“Take me,” she mumbled against his mouth, her hips twitching with new urgency between his legs.
* * *
“Here?” He blinked through the fog of lust to gauge their position and saw her white teeth flash a smile.
“No. Take me home and then take me. Or take me anywhere. Just—” She nipped his lower lip with a damp bite. “Please let’s go somewhere.”
“Amen.” He gave her nipple one last soft pinch before extracting his hand from her sweater. “I’ve got to turn in the toboggan, but if you wait for me here, the lodge is fairly close on the other side of the lake.”
“Hurry.” She eased off of him and peered around the ice before pointing to a nearby warming shed. “I’ll wait over there.”
He was already on his feet, cursing the raging erection that kept him from sprinting back to the sled rental place.
“I’ll be back in five minutes, no more.”
“Make it four and we can relive our last outdoor make-out session on the way home.” Her hand drifted down his thigh and squeezed.
Memories of their walk through the Savannah marshes steamrolled him, flooding his head with images of Heather sinking to her knees…
“Four,” he promised, heart sledgehammering his chest because he was an idiot to have thought this weekend could have led anywhere else but to bed.
His feet were moving fast in spite of the heavy desire flooding his veins because he was a man on a mission now. Heather might think they were just reliving the past this weekend, but he knew the outcome was going to be different from anything she expected.
Chapter 4
Heather was practically crawling out of her skin and they hadn’t even reached the halfway point on their trek to her cabin.
Jared had been insistent about no quickies in the woods even though she’d made a couple of attempts to convince him otherwise.
“Talk about role reversal,” he muttered under his breath as he tugged her up the next hill in the snow.
“What?” Her brain was so passion-fogged it only seemed to click along at half speed.
She’d forgotten how he could make parts of her ache with a fierceness close to pain.
“I remember a time when it was me trying to sweet-talk you into a close encounter in the woods.”
Trudging through a drift behind him, she had to smile at the memory….
* * *
“No one can see you except for me.” Jared’s words wound persuasively around her in the moonlight.
They’d walked so far away from the outdoor bar that the band’s holiday riffs faded into a dull rumble. The breeze blew in off the marsh, enveloping them in the scents of briny water and mud. She had her back to the marsh, her spine pinned to a wooden railing that ran the length of the boardwalk snaking through the wetlands.
“You think knowing that I only have an audience of one is going to make me strip naked for you here? Now?” Her heart had developed an all-new rhythm around him, sort of a cardiac hyperspeed. In fact, all of her senses felt elevated to a higher pitch with him nearby.
“I thought we weren’t going to play games with each other.” His hands curved around her waist, his fingers on one hand brushing under her tank top while his fingers on the other dipped into the waist of her denim miniskirt.
She didn’t know which felt better, but she knew she wanted more time to figure it out.
“I’m not playing games.” Her fingers tunneled under the sleeves of his black T-shirt, savoring the rock-hard muscle of him.
She had to remember to write Uncle Sam a letter to thank him for the superb conditioning that resulted in such a magnificent male specimen.
“Then why can’t you admit you want to get naked with me as much as I want to start peeling your clothes off?” His penetrating stare made his words a challenge.
Coming from any other guy, she could have balked at the level of he-man arrogance in that statement. But with Jared, that would have amounted to more game-playing and they’d said they weren’t going that route tonight. Jared traced the hem of her panties around the curve of her hip and her knees buckled.
“I can admit it, but there’s nothing wrong with me saying I’m not taking off my clothes in a Georgia swamp after midnight with a perfect stranger.” A woman had her standards after all. “Maybe we could see each other tomorrow.”
She could get naked with him then, after she’d had time to think rationally when she wasn’t under the influence of hormones and peppermint schnapps.
“We could do that.” His other hand splayed across her spine, covering an incredible amount of terrain. “Although I ship out of Savannah in—” he checked his watch “—twenty-nine hours. And technically it is tomorrow.”