“Same.” He pulls back a little, his eyes burning and intent. “Are you saying we can—”
“Yeah.” I flip onto all fours on my bed, panties still ringing my knees, and pull up my sundress, offering him my bare ass.
“Damn,” he mutters, positioning himself behind me, the jangle of his buckle, the susurrus of the ocean the only sounds in the room. “I’ve never done this before.”
“What?” I laugh and pull one cheek, spreading myself for him. “Now I know for a fact you’ve hit it from the back.”
His answering chuckle is husky, but there’s a note of . . . something. I look over my shoulder. “What’s wrong? You don’t want to?”
“It’s the first time I’ve ever done this raw, with nothing. You’re the only one.”
It strikes me that Canon won at Sundance when he was twenty-one years old. He’s been swimming in the shark-infested waters of entertainment nearly half his life. A man like that would have had to, by necessity, approach every encounter, sexual or romantic, as a potential snare. As a possible trap, or at the very least, as an ill-motivated act. He’d have to vet a woman before even considering this kind of vulnerability. The trust this must require of him.
I sit up and face him, letting my dress fall back around my hips and legs. I cup one side of his face. “If you’re not comfortable, we can—”
He silences me with a kiss—a craving, intense thing that sends subcutaneous shivers burrowing beneath my skin to skitter over my bones. A tender thing that disarms all my anxieties, my worries. He breaks our kiss long enough to pull the dress over my head and toss it aside. We tug at his clothes until they fall in a heap by the bed, and there’s nothing between us. We’re skin to skin. Our heartbeats strain for each other through our chests. My hands travel over him in claiming sweeps. He is suede and silk and leather, smooth and hard and rough, a decadence of textures between my sheets.
Staring into my eyes and tangling our fingers on the bed beside my head, he enters me on one deep thrust. The slick, hot entry, with nothing separating us, is startlingly good. He clutches my thigh, pulling it up and sinking deeper, his eyes blazing into mine. A harmony of gasps and sighs are accompanied by the pounding rhythm that thumps the headboard against the wall. A voracious hunger builds between us, and we grip, our hands tight on each other like we might slip away, might lose this if we don’t cling. It’s like riding a rocket, the propulsive force of it beyond our control, and its destination a place our minds can’t even conceive. When I unspool inside, I turn my face into the pillow, bury my scream of release. When my body jerks beneath him, it triggers an answering response, a matching release. This is the moment I treasure most, when he comes apart in my arms. When all the rigid discipline fails him in the face of our passion, and he drops his head to the curve of my neck, his breaths coming harshly, holding onto me like we are indeed in outer space and I’m the only solid thing in his universe.
Zero gravity.
Celestial. Astral.
Infinity: immeasurable.