Page 248 of Josephine and Clay

I reach out and tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Then I stop talking and kiss her. The kiss is overwhelming. The kind that makes the rest of the world disappear for a minute.

Her fingers curl against my shirt. I pull her a little closer.

“Come with me,” she murmurs. “Come inside.”

She doesn’t wait for my answer before leading me down the hallway, her fingers twined with mine, soft and insistent. The cottage smells faintly of vanilla and clean laundry. Her thumb circles the back of my hand.

I barely close the door before she’s on me. Pressed up on her toes, mouth to my jaw, then my neck, kissing a line to the hollow just behind my ear. Everything outside her disappears. It’s a struggle to remember which part of me is supposed to hurt and which part she’s making better by accident.

She guides me into her bedroom, the eggplant colored walls flashing past in a blur. Before I can take in much else, she's tugging my shirt free from my jeans.

I laugh. "Impatient."

"You have no idea."

She pulls the shirt over my head and tosses it somewhere behind her.

"Careful," I say.

She gives me a look that suggests she's heard the word and rejected it on principle.

Backing me toward the mattress, she presses another kiss to my mouth until the backs of my knees hit the bed. I sit, and she settles into my lap immediately, knees bracketing my hips as she catches my face between her hands.

My pulse kicks hard.

She's warm, restless, impossible to ignore. My hands find her waist while my brain tries, and fails, to keep up. Every instinct tells me to be careful, not to hurt her, not to get this wrong.

She kisses me like none of that matters.

She makes this sound, deep in her chest. A desperate, grateful whine. It breaks something open in me. I let her push me down onto the bed, let my hands learn the shape of her through her dress, the line of her thigh, the little invisible zipper at her side.

“Don’t stop,” she says, not really words, just all breath and want.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I promise, and mean it for once.

She’s warm and soft in all the places I need, and I don’t know where she ends and I begin. Part of me keeps trying to handle her gently, while the rest is hanging on by a thread. My hips want to buck, my hands want to clutch her so hard I leave prints, and somehow, I manage to keep both those things in check.

It’s almost worse this way, like being dragged to the edge of a cliff and told to wait there, trembling, until someone decides if you fall.

She pulls the blue dress over her head in a single motion. The straps catch, dragging against her shoulders, and my breath stutters in my chest. My mouth goes dry, and every coherent thought leaves at once. She waits until I finally meet her eyes again before she unhooks her bra and tosses it somewhere between the bedsheets and the floor.

“Jeez, Jo,” I manage. “You’re so…”

She leans in, so close her hair falls in a curtain between us, and whispers, hot against my throat, her pulse jackhammering as she tries to melt carefulness out of me. I don’t let go, just hold her there, fingers cinched gently around her wrists.

Her lips part. I see the want there, the challenge and the ache. Josie is the kind of girl who needs to win the moment, but I need to lose to her.

I pin her wrists above her head before she immediately pushes back, so hard I nearly black out. She gasps, then laughs, something torn between delight and surprise.

My grip slips.

She twists out of my hold, catches me off balance, and suddenly we're rolling. A second later she's on top again, hair wild and falling into her eyes.

The tension is nuclear. Neither of us is saying shit, but all the words are there in the sound of her breath, the way she says my name like she’s giving me a gift.

I roll her onto her back and let go of her wrists, but she grabs my hair and pulls me down. The kiss leaves a wet stripe along my jaw. She bites at the stubble under my chin, curses when it burns her lips, does it again just to make me growl.

My cock is pressed between us, hard and dragging against the new slick heat between her thighs. Neither of us seems interested in thinking anymore.