“Dance with me.” The words came out as a whisper.
“Here?” she whispered back.
I nodded slowly and mimicked her slight smile.
In answer, she settled her fingers gently on my sleeve and, as I steered her into what I could remember of a waltz, she gave my bicep a squeeze.
“Are you man-handling your dance partner?”
Her giggle seemed to shimmer in the misty air. “Certainly not. I’m ogling.”
“Me, or the fountain?”
“Both.” I’d turned us sideways to the water, so she could still watch the show. But instead, she kept her eyes right on mine. I felt a weird little flip low in my stomach that I’d never experienced before.
One side of her face was bathed in the fountain light, the rest so shadowed I could only barely make out the glitter of her eye.
How perfectly appropriate that I’d only get to see half of her while a soaring duetic tale of separation guided us around our makeshift dance floor.
I felt Jen easing closer, and there was just no way in hell I could handle her rubbing up against me right now. I was already thinking of rescinding the no-sex-til-she-stays rule as it was. For the sake of my sanity, I stepped back and adopted simply the No Orgasming in Public in My Pants law. To keep her away from my zipper region, I steered us into a series of turns and hoped to God that there were no people nearby that we might trample.
“I think we’re the only ones dancing,” Jen said, straining to be heard over the music and the slapping sound of the fountain-water.
“So?”
“We look silly.”
I made sure she was looking at me before my eyes slowly made their way down from her breeze-tousled hair to the notch in her collarbone—which was seriously begging for my tongue to dip into—then back up to her chin.
I didn’t go past her lips. I couldn’t. They were mesmerizing. “You look beautiful.”
Knowing her, she was probably blushing, but I wouldn’t know—I was spellbound as she sucked in her bottom lip and caught it in her teeth.
I tilted my head until my mouth was a whisper above hers. “No fair. I wanted to do that.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Before I could answer, she closed the final distance between us to feather her lips against mine. As my eyes drifted shut, I ended our swaying and, with a slow slide of my hand down her bare spine, pulled her nearly flush against me.
She fit perfectly. As always.
I nipped at her lips until those little noises from her throat that drove me half out of my mind turned into one long, low moan. At some point, her hands had landed on my lapels; when she used them to tug me even closer, a muffled roar hit me square in the ears. I was startled until I realized that it came from my own chest. And I only figured that out because I did it again.
With the pressure of her soft belly against the iron behind my fly, I had to keep reminding myself that grinding against her on the very public sidewalk in front of Bellagio was a truly bad idea. In an effort to distract myself, I concentrated on her maddening mouth and getting her to let me inside.
She was either a mind-reader, or was as on-edge as I was, because she opened for me without so much as a nudge.
All the fooling myself I’d done over this woman was erased with the first hint of the toffee that was uniquely Jensen. Fireworks, explosions, waves crashing—hand me any trite expression and, I swear to God, I lived it when her tongue slid alongside mine.
Wrapped in her scent, her taste, and her arms, I asked myself again how I would let her go. How she could even want to.
A whistle and a smattering of applause broke through the haze of desire that whirl-winded around us. Jen stepped back, her eyes glued to mine. I didn’t know if they were clapping for the show that had just ended, or for the show Jen and I had been giving them.
And I didn’t care.
“Let’s go home,” Jen said in a low voice that arrowed straight to my groin.
I didn’t tell her that, with her in my arms, it felt like I already was.
Our mouths were pretty much fused from the moment we got out of the car in my driveway, and, ricocheting off the walls ‘til we got to my room, we left a trail of clothes and shoes until all that remained was our skin and her smile…
Except that didn’t actually happen. Can you hear my blue balls screaming here?
For the entire drive back home, Little Head was at war with Big Head. My need for her—and the resulting samba of my pulse below my belt—was a dangerous distraction. Three hobbling old ladies with canes, two pigtailed girls on bicycles, and a couple of guys carrying a plate-glass window should all count their lucky stars that the head on my shoulders was marginally in charge and I didn’t run them over in various crosswalks.