It wasn’t just the heat of his mouth or the swirl of his tongue around my nipple that had my entire spine arching off the bed. It was the way he touched the other one with reverence and hummed against my already tingling skin like I was some kind of delectable dessert he had been deprived of until now. It was like he was going to use every sensory tool he had to savor me, and it made my hands shake, which had getting that throbbing erection free from its denim confines harder than it should have been.

“Race?” His name was a question and a plea.

He just grunted in response and pulled his head up off of my breast as he levered himself up in a one-armed push-up so that he could help me shove the rest of his clothes out of the way. My arms were still tangled in the sleeves of his shirt, and when I went to wiggle out of it, he shook his head, sending gold strands of hair into those eyes that were gleaming dark with arousal.

“I like you all twisted up in something of mine.”

He caught both of my legs, which were splayed on either side of him, and lifted them up so that they were wrapped around his lean waist. When he leaned back down on the bed over me, everything about him that was hard and hot was pressed up against everything in me that was warm and melty. I wanted to lift my hips up to force him inside, but he put a hand on the side of my face and used his index finger to trace over the curve of my eyebrow, which was arched in question.

“That’s not how we’re going to do this, Bry.” He bent his head and kissed the high curve of my cheekbone and then my temple. I ran my hand up and down the sides of his ribs, careful of his still-healing body.

“What do you mean?”

He moved to the other side of my face and repeated the gentle, lulling kisses at the same time as my body involuntarily arched into his. I could feel how ready he was, evident by the beads of arousal, wet and warm against the inside of my thigh, but for some reason, he held himself just out of reach.

“Get in, get off, and get out. We aren’t going to do that to each other. I don’t give a fuck what the reasons end up being, in the long run all I care about is that you are here, and when you are, I’m not going to ever give you a reason to regret it.”

His eyes burned into mine and then he kissed me. He kissed me with his mouth. He kissed me with the rest of his body as he finally sank inside of me. He kissed me with his hands as they trapped my face between his rough palms so that I was still and couldn’t look away from him, and he kissed me with something deeper, something more significant than that, as I felt his heart trip and dance against mine. I lifted my hips up to take him inside my clamoring body even farther, and curled my legs up higher along his sides.

“It isn’t always easy. You aren’t always easy, but I have yet to regret any of it, Race.”

I tasted the words as he breathed them back into me and we panted against each other as he planted his hands on either side of my head and started to move. Having sex with Race never felt the same, each time our bodies connected I felt like both of us were leaving pieces of ourselves behind with the other. I saw the darkness in his gaze deepen, felt his breathing hitch a little as the slick surface of our skin rubbed together.

I used my teeth on the lobe of his ear, kissed the sensitive skin behind it, and buried my nose in the hollow of his throat as I felt my body start to quake and flutter around him. His rhythm picked up, and one of his hands disappeared between us, his sensuous pace picked up a little, and muscles and veins in the arm that was holding him up bulged and flexed in a heady show of strength. I wanted to tell him not to bother with the added caress because I was already there. His words and the way he was looking at me, the way he kept bending to kiss me, to make love to my mouth as thoroughly as he was making love to the rest of me, had me already on the edge. I could feel how liquid I was, how needy my inner walls were, as they pulled at him, and the entire room smelled like sex and expensive Scotch. It was indisputably sexy.

Race being Race had to go the extra mile, though. He tickled the indentation of my belly button with his finger, which had me giggling into the curve of his shoulder, and then he was there, right at that center of me, where coiled pleasure writhed and begged to be released. Clever hands delving into the place where we were joined, into the damp fold of my sex and right on target. He used his thumb to press down and simultaneously levered his hips so that he was driving as hard and as deep as he could. I lost my breath and couldn’t keep my eyes open under the onslaught of pleasure and emotion that engulfed me. I might have screamed his name, or maybe I blacked out for a second, because the next thing I knew he was grinding his way to his own release and groaning his completion into my mouth as he dropped down and sealed our lips together in one final soul-entangling kiss.