“What?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
The thing I loved was that I could wait to ask him more because we had the time, not because I feared the reaction.
People shifted around us, moving to the dance floor as he and I talked.
He preferred winter over summer and broke his leg when he was twelve.
He didn’t drink often, and only one beer when he did.
When he went to college, his sister made him take a stuffed animal so he didn’t get lonely, and he kept it on his bed his entire freshman year, no matter how much his roommates teased him.
He asked me why I decided not to go to college and how it was being raised by my brother.
When the cake was cut and passed around, he took a piece of coconut, and I chose the strawberry, which we shared. When he held his fork out to me for a bite of his cake, I absently wondered if I’d ever get sick of talking to him. Of hearing what he had to say.
His eyes darkened when I licked at a speck of frosting at the edge of my lip.
When our plates were cleaned of cake, I sat back in my seat and surveyed him carefully. “Not a bad date, Hennessy.”
At the use of his last name, he quirked an eyebrow. “We’re back there.”
“Well,” I drawled, uncrossing my leg so that I could turn fully to face him, “I think you still owe me a little bit.”
“Do you?”
His dry tone had me smiling. “You didn’t have to buy me dinner,” I told him. “Or dessert.”
He hummed, caging me in by setting an arm on the table, the other stretched along the back of my chair. “How would you normally end a date like this?”
There was no way for me to answer that without giving myself away completely. I had no idea where the night would lead, but I knew where I wanted it to. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a date like this,” I told him with complete honesty.
Based on the look in his eyes, he saw the truth of my answer.
“Me neither.”
It knocked the breath from my lungs when he said it, and I didn’t realize how badly I craved some sort of sign that this intensity wasn’t one-sided, wasn’t confined just to my inexperience.
Because I couldn’t not, I leaned forward, cupping the side of his face in my hand, and I slid my lips over his in a soft kiss.
We left the kiss there, pulling back at the same time, content not to deepen it further.
Aiden turned, placing a kiss in the center of my palm. “Dance with me?” he asked.
Slowly, I nodded, and he stood, a firm hold on my hand as he led us to the dance floor crowded with people. We stood between a former defensive player of the year and his wife, and an executive from Molly’s job at Amazon, and not once did his attention waver.
It didn’t matter who surrounded us, I realized.
It didn’t matter what he may have experienced in his past, or what I had yet to experience in my future. This was about us. Aiden gathered our joined hands against his chest, over his steadily beating heart, and his other arm curled low around my waist as he pulled me into his body. My free hand slid around his back, and I laid my head on his chest as we swayed.
His fingers strayed slowly, first to the edge of my dress where it wrapped around my body, but he dipped beneath the fabric to strum featherlight touches along the curve of my hip. With a restless exhale, I shifted closer, and he tightened his hand around mine.
The beat of the song was slow and sweet, but in his arms, it became something else entirely. It was foreplay.
All of it had been.
For days and weeks.
My fingers on his back curled, nails digging slightly into the hard, shifting muscles on his back and I lost the ability to breathe properly when I closed my eyes and imagined how they’d feel when he moved over me. He’d be relentless. He’d be brutal if I begged it of him.
Aiden’s chest expanded on a deep inhale, his nose burying into my hair. When he made a restless shift of his own, I felt how much he wanted me. The noise that started in my throat was practically a purr. And he heard it.
“We either need to stop dancing or get the hell out of here,” he rasped in my ear.
Tilting my head up so I could lock gazes with him, I licked my lips before speaking. His nostrils flared when I did. “What will you do to me if I choose option two?”
Somehow, he managed to tighten his grip on me, bring me even closer to him so that he could rest his lips against the shell of my ear. “I am going to do everything,” he growled. “And trust me, my imagination has come up with a lot since you decided to climb into my bathtub without me.”
I was panting when I stepped back, my hands shaking. At first, his face smoothed like he thought I might deny him.
“You have ten minutes to get a room,” I told him in a remarkably even voice. “I will meet you by the elevator.”
It took six minutes for me to hug and kiss Molly and Noah, who were swamped by people, and to inform the twins that I would be exiting the party early. No one argued with me, and Lia gave me an obnoxious high five.
I marched—shoes and clutch in hand—to the elevator, where I saw him waiting for me.
Calmly, he hit the button and slipped his hands into his pants pockets. I blew out a slow breath while the numbers descended.
In the quiet between us, I wondered a dozen things about how it would be between us, what waited when we opened the hotel room door to complete privacy.
But one thing
