Page 89 of Fallen Flame

My heart completely forgot how to function. I stared at him. “You...”

“I know what I said.”

“And?”

“And I meant it.”

I reached up and cupped his face. “I really like hearing you say things like that.”

His smile was small. Private. Mine. “I know.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’ve gotten awfully confident.”

“You keep kissing me. I must be doing something right.”

“That’s because you’re kissable.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Oh, will you?”

“I plan to.”

I kissed him again.

The world outside the cooler disappeared. There was only him.

The metal door bit cold and hard through my thin work shirt, but I barely felt it. Oliver’s body was furnace-warm, pressed flush against mine, his thigh sliding between my legs as his mouth found the hollow beneath my ear. I shivered, and he laughed, low and knowing, his breath hot against my skin.

“Cold?” he murmured.

“Not with you pressed up against me.”

His hands dropped to my hips, and his thumbs hooked into the waistband of my pants. I reached for the hem of his shirt, pushing it up, needing to feel him. My palms flattened against the hard planes of his stomach, and his muscles twitched beneath my touch. My eyes tried to take in all of his tattoos—roses and thorns, a snake coiled over his heart, script I couldn’t read in the dim fluorescence. I traced a raven with my fingertips, and he caught his breath, his hips pressing harder into mine.

“Your shirt,” I breathed.

He pulled it over his head in one rough motion, and I looked my fill. The tattoos didn’t stop at his chest—they swept down his ribs, disappeared into the low line of his jeans, reemerged along his arms. He was a story written in black ink, and I wanted to read every word with my mouth.

“Your turn,” he said, and his fingers were already working my button, the zipper, and then shoving the fabric down my hips. I kicked off my shoes, stepped out of my pants, and the concrete bit into my bare feet. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, my legs wrapped his waist, and I felt the hard line of him through his jeans, pressed exactly where I ached.

“Oliver—”

He set me back against the door, one arm braced beside my head, the other yanking his own zipper down. I helped him, frantic, my hands shaking as I pushed the denim past his hips. Then there was only skin, heat, and the unbearable closeness of him as he guided himself to me and sank in with a slow, perfect pressure that made my head fall back against the metal.

“Look at me,” he growled.

I did. His eyes were dark, his jaw tight, and sweat beaded along his temples despite the chill. He started to move, and I gasped, my nails digging into his shoulders, feeling the shift of inked muscle beneath my palms. Each stroke drove the breath from me, my body tightening around him, the sound of our collision lost in the cooler’s hum. I moaned, unable to stop it, and he answered with a ragged sound of his own, his forehead dropping to mine.

“You’re so loud,” he panted, but he was smiling, wicked and wild. “They’ll hear you out there.”

“Don’t care.” I pulled him deeper, my heels digging into his back. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”

He didn’t. His rhythm built, relentless, the door rattling against its frame with each thrust. I was panting, gasping, the cold air burning my lungs while everywhere else I burned for him. The pressure spiraled higher, tighter, his name breaking from me again and again like a prayer. When he shifted his angle, he hit something perfect and devastating inside me, and I shattered. My cry echoed off the concrete walls, my body clenching around him in waves that tore through me like lightning.

He followed. Two more hard, deep strokes, and he buried his face in my neck, groaning long and low against my skin as he spilled inside me. His whole body shuddered through the release. We stayed like that, trembling, breathing, wishing the world would stay gone. The cooler hummed. Somewhere, a compressor clicked on. I held him, and he held me, and for a long moment, nothing else existed.

“Wowzah,” I whispered when I could muster up any thoughts.