Sure, Lucas had told me over and over on the way home he was glad I was safe. Sure, he’d told me I was amazing. But now I just felt like the naughty girl caught skipping Sunday School to go hang out at the mall. A ridiculous reaction, probably. In fact, I’m damn near certain I was coming down and coming down hard from the adrenaline rush of my adventures with Bobby and his bastard father.
It didn’t matter.
A shower. I wanted a shower. And I damn well was going to have one.
I stripped, tossing my discarded clothes about our bedroom as I did so. Normally I’m a tidy person when it comes to clothes. Lucas is the take-it-off, toss-it-over-the-chair one in our relationship. I’m the take-it-off, put-it-away-or-in-the-laundry one. But right then, in the middle of a grump attack, I threw my clothes everywhere. Didn’t care.
I glared at myself in the mirror above the basin for a second, and then stepped into the shower.
The cool water streamed over my body. A shiver rippled through me. I closed my eyes and lifted my face into the stream, slowly counting to ten in my head. To be honest, I don’t know why I was so agitated. Was it just the aftermath of what had happened that morning? Or was I irritated by something else?
Bobby and his mom…
My stomach clenched. The absolutely fear and then joyous relief on Bobby’s mother’s face had rocked me. How must it have been, all these days her son was missing, taken from her? How terrified must she have felt?
I’d lived through some insanity the last few weeks, and my parents knew none of it. My life had been threatened, I’d been sexually threatened, attacked, had a gun held to my held…
Mom and Dad knew nothing about any of it. Nor did they know where I was. I’d sent them a message telling them I was staying with someone else and totally okay, but not who. That kind of confession—that I was with Lucas Pratt, a boy my father had declared “nothing but trouble”—required face-to-face engagement.
Oh boy. Engagement. My dad was going to lose it when he found out Lucas and I were engaged. I mean, lose it.
I dropped my head, letting the water run over the back of my neck. Perhaps I was out of sorts because my parents didn’t know about everything. How would Mom and Dad cope with it? If something had happened to me in the weeks since Lucas had turned up naked, bloody, beaten and aroused in my bedroom, in the weeks since my whole world got turned upside down, how would they process it? Deal with it?
Guilt lashed at me, hot and cold at once.
Guilt and sudden worry for them.
And for Lucas. I’d kept my parents in the dark about him, for fear of how they’d react. That was crappy. The only thing Lucas feared was something happening to me, and here I was, scared to tell my parents about us?
“Okay,” I mumbled, the water streaming over my cheeks and lips. “This needs to be fixed.”
“It does.”
I raised my head at Lucas’s deep voice. Turned to look at him.
He stood watching me, expression guarded, unreadable. “Are you mad at me?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t. I was mad at myself.
“Can I make love to you?”
His question—asked with an uncertainty I’d never heard from him before—tore at my heart. “Yes. Just let me finish my shower and—”
He stepped into the shower, fully clothed, his stare holding mine.
“Lucas,” I blinked at the water, at him, “you’re getting—”
He silenced me with a kiss.
Burying his hands in my wet hair, he crushed my lips with his, his tongue delving into my mouth, seeking out mine. Mating with it.
I moaned, the familiar and all-too-addictive hunger his touch awoke in me turning my blood hot. I pressed my naked body to his fully dressed one. His clothes, drenched and clinging to his body, rubbed at my skin, a wicked friction that detonated a delicious tingle in my core.
There was something uniquely erotic about being in the shower with him in such contradictory states; both horny, my body utterly exposed, his covered completely and yet revealed to me by the wet fabric of his jeans and shirt.
His cock—a hard, thick pole in his sodden jeans—pressed to my belly, undeniable.
As if I could ever deny Lucas’s cock. Ha.