Page 96 of Dream House
“So, what were you doing?”
Lark doesn’t blink.
“Honestly?” He straightens, but his hands slide only to the back of his neck, his bare chest, defined triceps, and the dark hair of his armpits making him look both virile and vulnerable. “I was standing here… fighting the urge to go to you.”
Holy curling irons.
Everything stops. Time. Breath. Thoughts.
“Wh-What?”
Lark groans and drags the heels of his hands over his eyes. “That sounds awful. I swear—” Now he stacks both hands over his heart, eyes on mine. “I swear, I never would have done it.”
Despite his promise, I picture him coming to my room. Of me waking up as he slips under the covers.
Even in nothing but my cami top and PJ bottoms, I go hot all over.
This feeling that I’ve been struggling to avoid, that I’ve been fighting to deny, refuses to be denied any longer. I could go back to my room and hide behind a locked door, but I already know the door and that lock couldn’t keep any of this out.
Lark’s gaze is stricken, his hands still over his heart. “Please say something,” he whispers. “Tell me you know I wouldn’t take advantage of you like that.”
I take a step forward. “I—” I swallow. Do I know it?
I think about the man in front of me who drops everything to rescue his threatened roommate. Who cradles his three-month-old niece with a burp rag on his shoulder. Who was willing to allow my four-year-old to keep the two hundred dollar rock she’d lifted from his room. Who has offered to help me launch my business.
“I know that.”
He drops his hands from his chest and exhales, relief clear in the slope of his shoulders, his sculpted, flawless shoulders.
“But—” I take another step forward.
Awareness ripples over his gaze, and shame slips off him like an unknotted cloak. Lark takes a step closer to me.
I raise my right hand and let my fingers land on his wrist with a feather-light touch. “What if I can’t forget you said it?”
The question has barely left my lips before his slam into them.
The contact is an erotic shock. A collision of pure pleasure and surprise. His rough hands capture my face and draw me closer with a cautious tugging. Mine answer by falling to his chest, my fingers fanning over his bare skin.
Lark shivers under my touch, and I get to relish the response only a moment before his tongue parts my lips. When I open for him and his tongue glides over mine, everything else falls away except the discovery. His taste is silvery like rain water, rarified by sun and air and clouds. And as I slide my tongue around his, my one thought is,Of course. This is the only way hecouldtaste.
One of his hands moves into my hair, cupping the back of my head. When he pulls me deeper, my whole body responds. I moan.
He inhales roughly at the sound, his chest swelling beneath my hands. I draw them over his pecs. When my fingertips read the Braille of one puckered nipple, I learn two things: One: I want to lick that nipple. Two: Lark sounds like a wolf when I touch that nipple.
“Stella,” he growls against my mouth.
But that’s the only word because our mouths seal against each other again. Keeping that one hand in my hair, his other glides down, over my shoulder blade, down to grip my waist. Ducking under the hem of my top, he flattens his fingers against my back while his thumb traces my side. The touch sends fuzzy shockwaves clear to my clit. I shudder hopelessly.
His taste. His touch. This tension. It’s all both new and somehow known. Even through my denial that itcould beat all, I knew that itwould bejust like this.
And how could I not? We’ve been sparking against each other like jumper cables for weeks.
Except… it’s so muchmore.
More heat. More hunger. Morehim.
I run my hands down the muscled terrain of his back, drawing a moan from him. Lark’s mouth moves from my lips to my jaw to my neck. The hand at my waist tugs me closer, and the hard shaft of his erection is my pleasure and pride.
