I think back to what I’ve learned about his bipolar episodes, and all I can wonder is if in his different gene expressions, he could feel differently about me? If I told him I loved him, would he push me away, when all I want is to be closer to him?

“Brooke, he’s so fucking into you, of course he’ll say it back!” Mel’s excited green eyes twinkle.

Hope and dread war in my chest, and I still don’t think I have the courage to risk what we have.

“I’m not sure that he’s … equipped to love me like this. He's different, Mel.”

I wish I could tell Melanie the truth, but I will guard his secret for him if it kills me. I remember the “Iris” song so clearly now, and the words of wanting to be known. He wants me to know him. Not Melanie. And definitely not the world. So I don’t elaborate anymore.

“Brooke. He's Remington Tate, of course he’s different. Tell him, Brookey! Tell me, what have you got to lose?” she taunts.

My stomach clenches in nervousness. “Him. He could push me away. He could…lose interest and go after something else. I don’t know! All I know is he’s too important and I don’t want to ruin this.”

I never fully recovered the last time I broke something—it’s been the worst experience of my life—and it was only my knee. The thought of getting my heart broken makes me bury my face in my palms with a groan. At least if I keep my love a secret, he and I can still have this wonderful, odd, exciting relationship together where I love him in silence and pretend he’s loving me in silence too.

“I want to wait for him to tell me first,” I pleadingly tell her.

She seems immediately disgusted.

“Argh, little chicken.” She gets up and comes to mock slap me in one check, then the other, and then she smacks me for real with a kiss on my forehead. “All right, so while you go bang your Prince Charming and begin your happily ever after, I might go use my condoms. Or, I might go hound Riley and Pete and see if anyone can take me out somewhere. See you tomorrow? Details, details.”

I squish her tight before I shove her out the door and slap her butt as she leaves, and silky ribbons of excitement unfurl inside me as I pad barefoot into the master bedroom. The shower water runs and a bolt of excitement rushes through me at the thought of stealing into the shower with him.

My whole being fills with wanting when I close the bathroom door quietly behind me as Remy soaps his head inside the glass shower stall. Tingles of anticipation tickle the inside of my stomach as I strip down to my skin. I’ve never been so blatant with a man, but this is my man. My one and only man. And he’s sexy and nude and I missed him like crazy.

I open the glass shower door, and step inside with his beautiful slick skin and big hard muscles, pressing my naked breasts to his back as I wrap my arms around his waist. He groans and tugs my arms tighter around him, and the words I love you are there inside me. I've never loved anyone in my life and I never imagined it could be like this.

It is the most amazing, invigorating, frightening feeling I’ve ever had in my life. As addictive as endorphins and more. I lick up his spine and to his nape, sliding my hands downward to touch his erection. He’s already fully erect, and my every sense becomes attuned to him. The contact of our bodies, my front to his magnificent back, the feel of his throbbing length pulsing under my fingers.

I get a rush thinking it’s for me. Just me.

Through the pounding water, I hear his groan. “Hmm. Touch me, Brooke,” he murmurs, grabbing both my fists in a tight grip and guiding me over his cock.

A hot shudder courses through my body. I’m completely eroticized by his huge fists guiding mine over his slick, long hardness. Burning hot between my legs, I lick the drops of water from his back. Like a cat, I rub my aching breasts to his hard back muscles and twirl my tongue up his beautiful lean spine. “I get butterflies when you say my name.”

He flips around and takes my hair in his hand and yanks my head back so our eyes meet. He stares at me, his look positively feral, and my sex clenches in needy anticipation as he speaks. “Brooke Dumas.”

I shudder, and lean my wet body into his. “Definitely butterflies.”

“Let’s take care of them…” His smile is slow and wolfish. “Brooke Dumas.”

I laugh, but he doesn’t, and when his lips settle over mine, it isn’t to give me a slow, sampling of a kiss, but a burning, plundering kiss that wipes out any coherent thought from my mind. He takes my wrists and slowly pins my hands at my back, and a bolt of excitement shoots through me.

He shreds me to pieces with that unexpected restraint that lets me know he plans to do whatever he wants to me, and I like it. I moan feebly as his teeth graze my neck, undulate helplessly as he tugs my flesh so firmly, I think he’s going to give me my first hickey.

With both my wrists still manacled in his large hand, he draws back, panting, and his piercing blue eyes linger on my bare breasts. The savage need in his face makes my breath ripple unevenly past my lips. Desire arches my spine, and he sweeps down, his mouth covering my breast to suck me as fiercely as ever. He fondles the other tip with his free hand, his palm slick and urgent, and I love how his dark, tanned skin contrasts with the fair skin of my breasts. Expertly he squeezes the flesh and sucks the hardened point into the heat of his mouth, his other hand firm around my wrists.

My body shudders against his bigger one, my pussy gripping with red-hot need. The mist of the water coats both of our bodies as it pounds on his back, and I become frantic, suddenly needing him now, fast, urgently. “Take me,” I plead, straining up to him.

His eyes glimmer as he pinches one nipple, and then the next. “That’s the plan.”

He lifts me easily by the waist and instead of lowering me onto his cock, he brings my breasts to his mouth. He sucks one, then the other, his arm muscles flexed as he keeps me in the air, feeding himself my nipples. Sensations hit me like lightning. Every suck on my nipples zaps down to my toes. And when I can’t stop whimpering and grimacing from the mind-boggling pleasure, he drops me down on his erection with such force that the instant he rams into my sheath, I’m so jolted, a breathless cry tears free from me.

“Too hard?” Voice craggy in desire and concern, he yanks me back up, his biceps bulged like rocks as he waits for me to speak.

Breathless, I shake my head and grab his shoulders. “I want you,” I whisper. “Please let me have you.”

His face clenches with need.

He lowers me more slowly this time, but he’s still massively big and drags thickly over every inch of my channel. A haggard whimper tears from my throat as I hang onto his hard shoulders, and when he starts moving, fucking me for real, I lose it and run my tongue along the slightly scratchy whiskers on his jaw, and suck his ear, gasping and moaning as I ride him as fast as I can. As fast as he’s riding me.

Electricity frissons down my spine when he slides his tongue into my ear, gently fucking me with it. “I love,” he rasps, the unexpectedly sexy way he utters the word catapulting me to within a breath of my orgasm, “how you fit me…”

“I love it too,” I say, part moan, part gasp.

He tugs my earlobe with his teeth, his haggard breaths straining his chest muscles as he holds me in the vises of his arms and speaks in my ear as he continues thrusting. “You’re so tight. So wet. Feel so good. Smell so fucking good. I knew you would be mine the instant I saw you. Aren’t you? Aren’t you all mine?”

“Yes,” I gasp, mewing because I love every word, trembling at each and every one he utters, letting them turn me into something wild and free until I’m whispering back to him, “Give me more, I want all of you, Remy, harder, please, harder,faster,” until I explode in his arms, the spasms in my pussy clenching rhythmically around his cock, milking his release out of him.

When I sag all around him, he grabs the back of my head in his open hand and holds me so tightly buried against his neck, I don’t even try to get my feet on the floor. He turns off the shower and carries us out, rubbing a towel over me before he drags it quickly over himself, and I get all gooey because he’s so strong and so sexy, he never even has to put me down before he immediately heads across the room so we hit the bed naked.

This is only our seventh night together, but I’m already anxiously awaiting the way we snuggle in bed.

Tonight he tucks me in, covers us up, and when he notices I’m limp and languid, he adjusts me so that he’s spooning me. I sigh in contentment as we settle down.

He scents the back of my ear. Then I feel his hand, scraping down my hair, softly petting me. His tongue follows, lightly lapping the place on my neck he bit in the shower. He drags it along the curve of my shoulders, my ear, awakening every inch of my skin.

I feel like he’s a lazy lion, bathing me with his tongue, licking and nuzzling me.

He’s done this other nights too. The unexpectedness of his raw petting drives me crazy with lust and love, and I’m getting addicted to this moment after the orgasm where I will be so relaxed and he will still have the energy to position me in a way where he can spoon me or hold me, and do all his manly, possessive lion-like OCD things with me.

Sometimes he washes his semen off my skin, but other times he gives me a series of slow, drugging kisses as he reaches between my thighs and fingers his semen back into my pussy like he wants to always be there.

Sometimes he asks me, with cocky blue eyes and in that sexy, lust-filled murmur he uses after making love, “Do you like it when I smear your skin with me?”

God, I love how he calls his semen “him.”

I love everything this guy does!

It’s still a novelty to me, to be sleeping with him. I’ve never slept with anyone before.

Every time we reach a new city, I wonder which side of the bed he’ll want, but Remington seems to always go for the one closest to the door, and I like the one farthest since it’s always closest to the bathroom. Although now that I think of it, even on the first night we slept together, it seemed to happen automatically.

He lays down on the side of the bed where he can put his right arm around me, and I can roll to my right side and drape myself all over him like a warmed gummy worm.

The first nights we were together, I wore his plain black t-shirt to bed but I don’t even bother anymore since he always takes it off me. He sleeps butt-naked and I can never even see him without wanting to jump his sexy bones. Remy is made to advertise everything that is manly, muscular, and sexy. I think that’s where a lot of his millions have come from. Advertising boxing gloves, some whip-fast jump rope, a sports drink, and a brand of sexy, tight, white boxer briefs.

He looks positively delish in those.

Tonight we’re both naked and deliciously entangled, and my sexy blue-eyed lion now seems content to have petted me for a long while, until I feel groomed down to my bones.

He’s pinned me to his side while his head rests on the bed headboard, and I notice one of his long, thick legs restlessly moves under the sheets. He doesn’t seem even the least bit tired.

“Are you getting … speedy?” I ask groggily, turning in his arms, hating that I’m now also using the term.