But that fondly squeezed feeling out of his incompetent heart. Two days ago he wouldn’t have given any thought to parting with animosity between them, but quite suddenly he hoped for something better than that.
She started to pull away and he brought his hand to the back of her head, silky curls crushed under his gentle insistence she stay close.
“I won’t forget this either,” he admitted.
Which scared him as much as the vulnerable way Rowan caught her lip between her teeth. He closed his eyes against a look that searched for reassurance and drew her forward so he could kiss her, making her release her bottom lip to his own gentle bite and lingering attention to soothe any tenderness he inflicted.
The kiss quickly got out of hand and he groaned, never having come up against anything like this: the desire to make love again so soon after the most intense orgasm of his life, or with a woman so new to it she couldn’t.
When she breathed his name against his lips and set a hand on his collarbone he had to let her put space between them.
“Are you saying you won’t forget in a good way or a bad way?”
Was she kidding? He glanced down at the raging muscle straining from between his thighs like a compass needle seeking North.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Her flush was pure mortification. “I thought it was good for both of us, but—”
“Maybe if you’re willing to practice we can do something about it?” he chided facetiously.
Rowan paled and he realized with horror that she’d taken it the wrong way. She tried to bolt from the bed and again he had to grab her, holding tight to her wiry strength while she struggled and slapped at him.
“That was a joke,” he insisted, trying to speak over her angry demands to quit manhandling her. He wouldn’t let her go, though—not when his heart was bottoming out at how badly he’d misread her sensitivity. “Rowan, listen. Ouch.” He swore as he took a scratch down his rib cage before he immobilized her.
“That wasn’t funny, Nic!” She was breathing hard, muscles a taut bundle of resistance against his hold, eyes spitting venom. “I know more about practice than anyone, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back to trying and not getting it right. For you. I’m living for me now—understand? I don’t care if it was good for you. It was good for me, so you can go to hell with your practice.”
His chest knotted up so tight he could barely breathe.
“It was good for me,” he insisted, pressing the words into her temple as she turned a stubborn cheek against him. He could see her brow pleated in hurt.
He didn’t know how to apologize with the kind of sincerity needed here, and inadequacy threatened to push him out of the room rather than try, but he had learned enough about her in the last two days to realize how deeply it would injure her to think her performance had failed to please him.
“I only meant I want to make love again and I realize you won’t want to.” He hurried to say it, shifting because he was aroused by their tussle and unable to hide it. He didn’t expect anything but a cold shower, though. “You have this insane effect on me, Ro. You always have. I can’t help it.”
She turned her head to look at him and he began to wobble on a tightrope a thousand stories in the air. He backed onto solid ground.
“I don’t know what it is with our chemistry. I had hoped once would be enough.” The lie bunched his muscles into aching knots. He had never believed once would be enough. “If you let me, I’d be on you night and day to work this out of my system.”
Her lashes came down to hide her eyes and he scowled, uncomfortable with how much he’d revealed. He was generally self-sufficient, but now he looked into a bleak future where his frustrating hunger for her might actually be worse, not easier to bear.
“If we were coming together as equals,” she said carefully, before she lifted wary lashes, “I’d let you. But not if I don’t have the sort of experience to keep you interested.”
“You—” she couldn’t see the fine tremble in the hand he used to smooth her hair “—are a natural. I’m at the disadvantage. I know how special this is.”
“Tell all the girls that, do you?”
“I’ve never said it to anyone,” he contradicted tightly.
“Really?” She rolled into him with a forgiving slither of silken skin and inviting softness, bending his mind away from the alarm bells against making comparisons or revealing how truly exceptional their experience was.
Her pleased smile provoked another zing of warning against feeding her ego and that sense of entitlement to adoration of hers. He didn’t want to be a slave to her good graces. But her light hands skimmed over him in deliciously arousing paths, rewarding rather than rejecting, and he quit caring that he was turning into one more ardent fan.