Page 35 of Forbidden Protector

"Started the second you got in my truck at the airport, before I’d even pulled us away from the curb, and you took your sunglasses off. First real look I got at your eyes." His thumb drags along my jaw, slow. "Honey. Didn't expect that. Spent the next ninety minutes finding reasons to check the mirror just so I could look again without you catching me at it."

"I caught you at it twice."

"Third time's the one you didn't catch." He says it like a confession, because it is one. "I've wanted you since that day. Didn't let myself say it out loud till you had your hands on my belt."

"I'm not saying it back."

"Didn't ask you to," he says, and it comes out rough, almost a growl.

That's more words strung together than I've gotten out of him since the airport.

I want to ask him if he knows what he just did, talking to me like that, but his hand is already working the clasp at my back. The bra follows my shirt onto the floor, and every question I've ever had melts into his hands and the current running straight down my spine, pooling at my core.

He takes his time getting the rest of me bare. When he's done, he lays me back on the bed like I'm something he's decided to be careful with, then hooks both hands around my ankles and pulls. One long, deliberate drag that puts me crosswise on the mattress, hips at the edge, legs hanging. I go up on my elbows to ask him what exactly he thinks he's doing and lose the sentence before it gets anywhere.

He doesn't come back up. He goes down instead, mouth trailing along the inside of one calf, my knee, the soft skin above it. In no hurry at all.

A man with nowhere else on earth he'd rather be. Every place his stubble drags leaves a rasp of heat behind that makes my breath catch out loud.

"Holt..."

"Told you. I've had a lot of nights to think about this." He lifts one of my legs, slow, deliberate, and sets it over his shoulder like he's got all the time this long, cold winter is going to give him.

The change in angle alone makes me squirm before he's done anything else at all. "Going to take my time with it."

"You don't strike me as a patient man."

"I'm the most patient man you'll ever meet." He takes the other leg next, just as slow, just as patient, and settles it over his other shoulder.

By the time he's got me open in front of him, I'm not holding still for anything. His voice comes muffled against my inner thigh, close enough that I feel his breath before I feel anything else. "Just never had a reason to use it on anything that mattered."

He gets to the top of my thigh and stops, just long enough to drag one deliberate inhale in against me. The sound he makes doing it, all gravel, almost reverent, drops straight through my chest like a stone through ice.

"God, Mackenzie, I knew you'd be this sweet."

Then his tongue licks a slow path from down low up to my clit, and every file I ever built on this man goes up like paper in a woodstove.

He's slow first. Deliberate. Reading me the way he reads snow and mirrors and a room full of liars. He’s adjusting when my hips move, when my hand finds his hair and pulls. He groans against me like my pulling is the whole point, like he wants to feel me lose the argument I've been having with myself since the airport.

Somewhere under all of it, a very small and very stubborn part of me keeps trying to open a case file on exactly this information and gets overruled every single time.

He talks between breaths, filthy and generous, that bass going straight through me where his mouth is. I quit fighting it. Quit being anything but a body that's been telling the truth since mile one out of Great Falls, whether I let it speak or not.

"Don't stop," I hear myself say, wrecked, with both hands in his hair now. "Don't you dare stop."

He doesn't. He works one finger into me, then a second, until my whole body goes taut and greedy around them. His tongue never lets up while he does it.

"You taste so perfect." He says it against me, close enough that the words buzz through me. Like he means to make a habit of saying true things now that he's started. "Better than I let myself imagine. And I imagined a lot."

I'm coming undone already and he's barely started. His fingers curl and find some deep, exact place inside me that makes my spine arch clean off the bed.

He picks up the pace, thrusting and sucking. When my thighs start shaking, clamped hard around his head like I could keep him there by force alone, he covers me entirely, his whole mouth over me, tongue driving deep, and I shatter.

I hear myself scream his name and keep convulsing through it long after any of it makes sense, until there's nothing left of me but hormones, his name, and his mouth.

He takes his time after, and I'd be embarrassed by the sounds I'm making if there were anyone left in me capable of embarrassment.

He comes back up my body slow, mouth trailing the same path in reverse. When he finally levels with me, he goes still.