“You won’t get me to pick his side in this fight with you, Maribelle,” Nash said as he waited for me at the steps. “If I had to choose, it wouldn’t be Louisiana or Georgia.”
When I joined him, we went up together while she stared down at us with her hands on her hips. “No? And just where would you pick?”
“Delaware,” he said without even a moment to think. My insides lurched as I tried to decipher the meaning of his choice, because I wasn’t the only one to live in Delaware. Tristan did, as well, and while she had made it quite clear that they were just friends, he would always feel responsible for her. How could he not after everything he’d just told me? What would that mean for any woman Nash chose to be with? Could he ever truly give his heart to someone when there were so many already hanging from it? Would he ever be able to put them first?
♫ ♫ ♫
After another wonderful dinner, we adjourned to the library where Carson beat me at chess once again. Instead of snorting and making deprecating noises, Nash was watching me with an entirely different look. A look that was all hunter―sniper―and instead of threatening my being, it was threatening the heart I’d somehow tossed stupidly in his direction just like I’d once tossed my clothes.
Regardless of the danger to my well-being, it was a look that had my insides quivering and my mind forgetting which step I had planned.
Carson won in half the steps he’d won the night before.
“You were distracted tonight,” he said, even though he had his back to the person to blame for my distraction.
“I was,” I told Carson, and Nash gave me a charming, knowing grin followed by a wicked wink.
“You’ll never learn that way,” Carson said with a defeated sigh.
“I think I’m just tired. It’s been a long week.” I stood, and much like the night before, Nash joined me in saying goodnight.
We walked up the stairs in a silence that felt expectant.
When we got to his door, he threaded his fingers through mine and pulled me into his room. I went willingly. I wanted to feel the fire and burn and collision of our bodies again. After my feelings had revealed themselves to me at the pool, I wanted to lose myself in him for a few hours. To feel like this was something real. Something beyond the mirage we’d stepped into since driving onto the estate. I wanted to pretend there was a love in his touch that matched my own.
I barely got a sense of red, white, and blue before his lips crashed down onto me. Everything else went out of my head. Just lips and tongues and bodies straining to be closer. The heart he’d twisted and shaped and marked was trying to escape its confines.
Nash pulled at my sundress until he found the hem, lifting it as his hands slid over my thighs to my butt which he squeezed in the most delicious way. His touch continued, bunching the material as the slow trail of his fingers cruised over my body until he was removing the dress and flinging it into the recesses of the room. My hands mirrored the action with his shirt, sending it in the same direction my dress had gone.
He picked me up and carried me to the large sleigh bed that took up the majority of the room where we shed the remainder of our clothes. Completely and unashamedly naked, I paused, kneeling on the mattress, to take in the corded muscles rippling over every ounce of his body. The tattoos and scars scoring him. Last time we’d done this, it had been fast and furious due to the tension we’d built over the long game of strip poker. I hadn’t been able to see all of his grooves and valleys. Like the small scar above his heart that I caressed gently.
He stood next to the bed, absorbing the details of me as I absorbed him. I had a feeling he saw more than I did, his sniper training capturing every single ounce of me. When he finally reached out to touch me, starting with one pink tip, it was tantalizingly slow. Drawn out as if to make each second last a lifetime. Every time I got desperate enough to attempt increasing the speed, he would push away and do the opposite. Go even slower.
He wrapped his arms around me, laying me down so gently it stunned me. His body joined mine, partially covering me, knotting our legs together. But even once we were entangled, he didn’t increase the pace. He just continued moving his fingers and mouth over me languidly, as if he was now memorizing with a touch what he’d already memorized with his eyes. Every curve, every dimple, every mole was stamped in a way no man had ever tried to do before. Each stroke, each kiss, each nip of his teeth turned me into a pool of weak limbs when I wasn’t weak. I wouldn’t be weak.
I pulled away, twisting our bodies so I straddled him, my legs shaking as he continued to score me with his fingers and lips, their path both beautiful and torturous. My hands surrounded the erection that pushed between us, copying his deliberate movements until I found myself overwhelmed with the need to have him inside me.
“Condom?” I asked, looking down into eyes so dark a green they appeared black.
His hands stilled momentarily before starting their tormenting whisper of pressure along my inner thigh once more.
“Is this what happens with the other men?” He said the words as if they were a tease, but there was no quirk to his lips or sparkle in his eyes. “Does Daniella come out and control everything? I wonder what would
