“Come here.” He takes me in his arms and pushes me down on the blanket, beneath him.

He frames my head with his arms folded and he looks down at me with those gold eyes.

We look at each other for a long, long time, until he reaches out his hand and rubs my lips with his thumb.

He’s so tenderly looking down at me—all of me. Even the boring spots like my neck and my shoulders and my tummy.

My throat feels tight. My vocal cords are tangled with words that I want to say but I’m scared to let out. I want to tell him that I love him, but it would make it even harder to leave Chicago in one week.

I don’t want him to be with me for fear of hurting me.

I don’t want to do that to him.

And something tells me that, even if he doesn’t love me, he cares enough he might do that for me.

So I tell him everything else.

I slip my hand under his T-shirt and am trying not to pant too obviously as I trail my fingers over his abs, teasing the little hairs near his waistband. “This line of hair from here, your belly button, disappearing into the waistband of your boxers. I love it.” My voice is breathy as I let my hand tease his erection over the fabric of his jeans, and his voice is rough when he replies.

“I love the ones here.” He dips his hand between my legs.

I buck a little.

He clenches his jaw when I do that, then he sits back and fists the fabric at the back of his nape and jerks off his T-shirt with one swift pull. He stands to unbutton and unzip his jeans.

I sit up almost instinctively to nix the distance between us as I watch him strip. Every line of muscle on his body shifts and ripples as he stretches back down to sit next to me.

My heart whacks madly at his nearness again.

Every emotion in my heart feels as if it’s squeezed inside there and it hurts to keep it in. It needs out.

We’re both naked and my skin singes in all the spots our bodies touch.

Callan reaches up to my nape and inserts all five fingers of his hand through my hair, and he holds my head still as he looks into my eyes as if absorbing me—his eyes tracking my features, one by one.

I’m breathless, memorizing how the moonlight kisses his face.

A muscle ticks in the back of his jaw before he presses his lips to my cheek, dragging them down my jaw, my neck, tasting me.

He lowers me down to the blanket.

“So beautiful.”

His tongue pushes back in my mouth and I’m disintegrating on the spot. His skin is velvet gold beneath my eager fingers. I can’t get enough of the feel of him. The scent of him.

He’s lean and athletic, and he looks even more rugged naked, with his hair tousled.

Crickets chirp nearby.

He cups and suckles one of my breasts. I gasp. The tug of his mouth on my nipple makes my back arch.

He parts my legs with one hand, and his fingers caress my inner thighs first. I stroke his jaw and press a kiss on his lips and he rewards me by swirling his tongue inside my mouth as he caresses my folds, gently with two fingers. He teases me with a fingertip.

I feel his fingers slide, first one, then two. Then he’s plunging deeper and slower.

“Ohhh. I . . . Callan.”

He starts kissing a wet path down my abdomen as his hands part my thighs. My eyes widen when he pushes my legs wider apart and then he’s tasting me. I gasp and press instinctively up against his mouth as his tongue probes. I moan, and he groans in reply and moves his lips in a hot trail up my abdomen, kissing my nipples again and then my mouth as he eases his fingers back into the place where I most ache.

He takes my breast in his hand and drags his tongue across the tip of my nipple, then covers it with his mouth.

I’m trembling, and he vibrates with urgency.

He looks at me and touches me at the same time, eyes coasting the swells of my breasts to the pink tips, which are puckered to the point of pain as I pant beneath him.

He winds a path with his lips down between my legs again. His hands remain on my breasts; he scrapes his thumbs over the peaks, then there’s the heat of his mouth at my sex, and I’m melting, pulling him up by the hair, wanting his weight on top of me and his skin against mine.

I writhe, and he curses softly when he realizes how much I need it, need him.

He leans over, and I hear the rustle of his slacks as he pulls out a condom and rolls it onto his hard cock. He leans over me, and I rub my legs against his thick, muscled, hair-dusted calves, then wrap them around his hips. And then he’s inside me.

That first thrust feels nearly orgasmic.

We’re not speaking.

But suddenly, we’re fucking a little wildly and making a lot of noise.

Without the walls to contain them, the noises we make seem to go on forever. Groans and moans as we make love, more like mating, a little animal and a lot hot. His hips rolling and his ass flexing, his back muscles bunching beneath my fingers, my thighs squeezing around his hips, my ankles locked at the small of his back.

“I’m in so deep,” he whispers. His hair falls over one eye and I brush it aside.

Adorable.

He’s so adorable.

My ruthless Chicago shark in the woods, as natural as if he’d been born here, from the earth, and me too.

“So fucking deep,” he grits out as he grabs my head and crushes my lips with his, never stopping his kiss, never stopping the rhythm, until I’m unraveling between him and the warm blanket beneath me.

We lie there sated for a little while, not even covered by the extra blanket. Our skin looks radiant in the moonlight, sweaty too.

He draws me to his side and brushes my hair back, then strokes his hand absently over my shoulder as he asks me, “You okay?”