Page 28 of Thunder

I close it.

God help me, I close it.

I lean down the last inch and I kiss him, and the second our mouths meet the two months goes up like dry grass.

He kisses me like a man who's been starving and just got told he's allowed.

One hand's fisted in my wet hair and the other bands around my lower back and drags me full against him, and I go.

I stop fighting all of it at once, I kiss him back just as hard with my hands sliding up onto his head, and the water sloshing between us.

He tastes the same.

He tastes like every night I told myself I was over him, and a sound comes out of me against his mouth that I couldn't stop if I tried.

"There she is," he growls against my lips. "There's my girl. Knew you were still in there."

"We shouldn't⁠—"

"Too late." He bites my bottom lip, not gently. "You're in the tub, rattlesnake. You made your choice when you put your boots in my water."

He gets my soaked shirt up and over my head and throws it somewhere with a wet slap.

His mouth is on my throat, my collarbone, working down, and his beard drags rough over my skin and I arch into it.

His hand comes up and closes around the side of my throat, thumb at the hinge of my jaw, the old familiar span of it, not squeezing, only holding, only owning, and my whole body remembers what that means and goes liquid.

"Still?" he asks, rough, checking, because even now, even wrecked and starving, he checks. "Two taps, same as always. You tell me."

"Still," I breathe.

"Yes. Don't you dare stop."

He gets my bra off and his mouth closes over my nipple and then his teeth.

I cry out and grab his head and he does it again, a rough graze that shoots straight down through me.

His hand still spanning my throat and his other hand working my jeans open under the water.

Wet denim does not want to come off.

I have to climb up out of his lap and peel them down and kick a boot off and lose my balance.

I grab the towel bar, and it's clumsy as hell.

He watches me the whole time with his eyes black and his chest heaving, one big hand wrapped around himself under the water.

When I finally get free of the last of it and turn back to him he says, low and dark, "Get back here and get on me."

"Your hip⁠—"

"Presley." His voice drops into the register that never once failed to move me. "I didn’t wait this long to have you climb back out of this tub. Get on me. I'll fuck you if I want to, and I want to, and my hip can take it up with management in the morning."

I get back in.

I straddle him carefully, both knees sinking into the water on either side of his thighs.

My hands on his shoulders. He's hard and thick against me and I have to stop and breathe for a second at the sheer overwhelm of it.