It was haunting, the way he looked at her, like he feared he may one day forget the details of her face. She was half-clothed but had never been more naked than she was in the silver, shadowy light, held in place by his eyes.
“One day, you’ll hate me.” There was a tiredness to his voice. It soothed her. The sound. Their proximity. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will happen.”
Her arms went heavy, dead weight at her sides, for she had resigned herself to be his for the night and he spoke of a forever that would never come.
Kenna cast aside the self-loathing and did the only thing that would bring her closer to her goal. She lied.
“I could never hate you.”
Gaze locked on his, she took a step back and undid the metal button of her shorts. She released the zipper in a drawn-out manner, not aiming to tantalize Dr. Merino but instead to give herself a minute to process what was transpiring. Undressing in front of someone was a new experience—Reid had always yanked her clothes off the second they were alone—and she hoped she wasn’t making a fool of herself. It wouldn’t exactly further Kenna’s research if the night ended with him laughing in her face.
He wasn’t laughing. Far from it.
Her tank top and bra went, leaving only the gifted underwear, and Dr. Merino looked at her as if she were some beguiling object, something spun from gold. Too precious to touch but too beautiful to not be beheld. He was quick to transition from admirer to appraiser.
A fire burned through her, insistent and familiar, as his index finger trailed along her throat, sternum, and stomach, retracting before he reached the hemline of her underwear.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?”
She stepped closer. Closer, somehow, than they’d been moments earlier. Close enough to feel the heat of his sex. Close enough for her breath to fan across his face as she said, “I do.”
Those two words, her confident intonation, broke something within Dr. Merino. She thought she saw him cock his head, like he couldn’t believe she’d said such a thing, before his arms locked around her and in one dizzying, fluid motion her back was flush with the mattress.
He stalked up Kenna’s body, easily finding her mouth in the semidarkness, and it was sensory overload.
The faint trace of ginger tea and honey on his tongue. The lavender airing out of the sheets with their movements and the petrichor clinging to his hair as it brushed her cheeks. The heat of their bare skin, chests heaving against one another, competing for the right to breathe. The restraint of his subdued sighs mingling with their fevered kiss. And if she’d opened her eyes, just a bit, she would’ve seen Dr. Merino hovering over her, nearing the complete absence of clothing.
But she needn’t look.
The suggestion alone had her pulse competing with the storm raging beyond the house’s walls.
Her thoughts spun as his affection drugged her, slowing her down, making everything blur together. He’d been pressing one of her wrists into the comforter for a while, maybe worrying that she’d again flee in a panic. There was nowhere Kenna could’ve gone, even if she had wanted to.
Not when she was on the verge of overdosing on a lethal mix of oxytocin and the taste of Dayton Merino.
His hand freed her wrist and it slid along the inside of her thigh, higher, higher, and she released a sigh of her own, remembering what Erin had relayed to Brandi.
How he’d made her feel otherworldly, like they were the only two people who existed. How Kenna presently felt.
Though her want for him was terrifying, she could not rid herself of it. Had she not been courageous enough to turn up on his doorstep, that kindling of desire would’ve burned within her evermore.
He traced the patterns in the lace of her underwear. His touch was light yet scorching, branding her flesh. Dr. Merino didn’t bother with removing the fabric nor did he venture beneath it. She swore her hips relaxed as he touched her through the material, applying a pressure so pleasurable it bordered on painful. The absence of light became disorienting with each flutter of her lashes as her body surrendered to him.
The lace had once moved with his touch but now it was plastered to Kenna, dampened with desire.
He planted a kiss between her breasts, dragging his mouth up her neck, up to her lips, where he spoke against them, “You’re all wet, lamb.”
A raging shade of crimson covered every inch of her skin and she was thankful for the anonymity of the darkened room. No one had ever spoken to her that way, and she didn’t quite know how to respond. She leaned toward saying something but feared sounding like an idiot.
Her teeth grazed his bottom lip.
“Only for you.”
“Fuck, Kenna.”
It was something she had never heard him say and she was pleased with the way it sailed over his tongue. Harsh, sharp, so much passion packed into one syllable.
His election of the word led to an intense pleasure ricocheting from Kenna’s core. The euphoria continued to roll through her body long after the initial high had passed. She blinked at the ceiling in the dark and felt pleasantly empty, like she may have floated away into the ether and maybe that wouldn’t have been so bad.