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I grip the edge of the chaise harder. “Do that again.”

Her mouth curves. “Mmm. I like what that does to you.”

She circles the tip with her tongue once more, slower this time, and the pleasure spreads through my stomach and hips so fast that my eyes close.

Rachel laughs softly against me. When she straightens, she is close enough that I catch the scent of her hair, and she pauses, breathing me in.

“You smell different this close.”

“Different how?”

She touches her nose lightly to my chest. “Green. Fresh. Like willow after rain.”

I don’t know whether that is good.

“I like it,” she says.

That answers the question.

She moves closer, and when we kiss again it feels nothing like the first kisses in the kitchen or beside the porch. Those were discoveries.

This is hunger.

Rachel shifts over me. Her hair falls forward around her face as she pauses with one hand on my chest.

I touch her hip.

“I want you inside me,” she says. “Okay?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know what it will feel like. I only know I want her to keep going.

Then Rachel guides me to her and lowers herself slowly.

The first touch of her around the tip of my cock shocks me so completely that my hands close around her hips. She sinks farther, taking me into a softness I could not have imagined because nothing else has ever felt like this.

She is hot and slick around me, her body stretching as she lowers herself inch by inch. Her breath catches, and her fingers tighten against my chest.

“The ridges.”

“You can feel them?”

“Oh, yes.”

Then she sinks the rest of the way, holding me everywhere at once.

For one suspended moment, I don’t move at all. I had no idea being inside her would feel like this. She surrounds me, warm and close, and even with neither of us moving, pleasure keeps changing around me. “Rachel.”

She looks down at me, her lips parted, her eyes darker than they were a moment ago. The sight of her above me, flushed and breathing hard because of what we are doing, sends another wave of heat through me.

“We’re connected.”

“Yes, Locke. We are.”

She spreads her hand flat over the center of my chest, over the place she touched the night I opened my eyes. The rhythm there strikes up into her palm, and I know she feels it, because her breath stops. The first thing I ever felt was her hand right there. It’s still the thing I feel most.

Every tiny movement changes what I feel and somehow makes the closeness of her around me even more intense. I thought I understood wanting her before this. I didn’t. I want to move, and I want to stay completely still so I can feel every place we are joined.