She grabbed the T-shirt and slipped it over her head, then sauntered over to me, sexy as fuck. An instant, violent twinge of possessiveness gripped my chest. Fuck what I said about the guy with the perfect GPA. I wanted to know how many times she had done this. How many other guys had seen her this way? The urge to completely ruin her, to erase every other touch from her memory, pulsed through me at a blinding force.
“Are you always this ready to fuck, or should we blame it on the alcohol?” I asked when she stopped inches in front of me.“Or the drugs,”I should have said but didn’t because I saw no reason to freak her out.
She propped one hand on her hip and glared up at me. “Are you always this big of a dick, or should we blame it on the stick up your ass?”
I gripped her chin between my fingers. “Keep fucking with me and I’ll show you the dick you seem to be so curious about.”
“Fuck. You.”
Her words challenged my demons. She’d always been defiant, but this was the first time she’d done it while standing in front of me half-naked.
I let go of her chin and trailed my fingertip along her jaw, then down the column of her throat, gently, tentatively, a contradiction to the harsh way I gripped her a second before. Her pulse thrummed under the pad of my finger, so delicate, so fragile. “Careful. You’re inching dangerously close to the fire.”
She bit her lower lip and brought her hand to my shirt, unbuttoning the first button. “Maybe I’m tired of standing alone in the cold.”
She was fucking provoking me. She had no idea who she was dealing with. I wasn’t a normal man with normal needs. When you lived your life with your every desire at your beck and call, the only thrill came from chasing things that didn’t want to be caught, taking what didn’t want to be had. I craved the unattainable. I was addicted to the forbidden, to the push and pull. My last name was enough foreplay for most women. In my world, a good fuck was always just a smile and a nod away. That wasn’t my thing. Easy access was for the weak. Give me a challenge, and my dick got hard.
I swallowed a groan. “You’re sixteen fucking years old. You don’t know what you want.”
“I know I want to feel what it’s like.” She continued unbuttoning buttons, and I didn’t stop her. “To be kissed.” Another button. “To be wanted.” Another button. She pulled my shirt open, then her hand traveled over my bare chest, letting her fingertips trace the tattoo that spread from my pec to my shoulder. “To be touched...” A pause. “Thatway.”
Hold up. What the fuck did she just say?
I circled my fingers around her tiny wrist, halting her movements, and looked down at her. “You’ve never been fucked?”
She was definitely high. Virgins didn’t act like this. Virgins who had never been kissed damn sure didn’t. Fucking Kyle just bought himself an ass whipping.
She shook her head.
“Never been touched?”
She shook her head again.
“Never been kissed?”
Another shake of the head.
The possessive jealousy from before unraveled then wrapped back around me as something else, something more primitive, like a clingy vine morphing into barbed wire. It dug at me until I almost couldn’t breathe.
She was untouched, unkissed, innocent. Part of me envied that. Most of me wanted to take her innocence and devour it. But I also wanted to protect it, to protect her from men like me, men who would destroy her. It was all one big mind fuck that was making it difficult to think straight.
I clenched my teeth. “You should get some sleep.”
“If you won’t show me, then will you at least tell me what it’s like? So I don’t look like a fool when it finally happens.”
When it finally happens.Just like that, she was the six-year-old girl in the wedding veil again, dreaming about her wedding day. There was a vulnerable girl underneath the smart-mouthed exterior. Except now, instead of dreaming about her wedding, she was fantasizing about being touched… kissed… fucked. She was both hellfire and holy water, and that made her dangerous.
“You want me to tell you what it’s like to be kissed?”
“Please.”
I was rock fucking hard with my demons practically clawing out of my skin, ready to be unleashed, and she wanted me totellher what it was like to be kissed. She might as well have asked me to strike a match and set myself on fire. The fucked-up thing was that I would, because if she thoughtshewas ready to burn, I was already engulfed in flames.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you what it’s like.”Even if it kills us both.I held her stare. “One minute, everything will be normal. Nothing in the universe will seem out of place. You’ll be watching TV or sitting across from each other having dinner or… standing in the middle of his bedroom.”