Having Hope in my arms meant everything. She smelled like lilacs. She was everything feminine and soft and when she let me lean into her so close our foreheads touched, I could also feel her hard belly pressing against mine.
Four heartbeats between us all.
God I loved this woman.
“Dammit,” she whispered, letting her arms slide around my waist. “This is why I was trying to keep you away. You befuddle my senses when I can see and touch you.” She shook her head and pulled away even as her arms clenched my waist. “I don’t know what to trust. You muddle my senses.”
I dipped down and kissed her. “I’ve missed you.”
She groaned into my mouth, a familiar, if pained, sound. “God, I want your hands on me right now.”
“I want the same thing. If you don’t trust me, fine. Trust what your body wants. It’s the last thing I can trust.”
She groaned again. “That’s what got us into this mess in the first place!”
I chuckled as I slid my hands around to her ass and squeezed. But then I got serious. “Baby, you’re the best mess of my life.”
And then I kissed her like my life depended on it. Because she might not believe it, but she was the air I breathed, so to me, it did.
Chapter 3
HOPE
I let him stay. In spite of my better judgment. Or hell, I threw judgement out the window the second I let him talk himself through that door even though he hadn’t really answered any of my questions.
But he kissed me like I was the air he breathed. How was I not meant to become intoxicated by it? By him?
Janus had always had the ability to transport me out of my own life. From the start when he’d pursued me… I liked to think I could tell the difference between creepy pursuit and the flattering kind after dealing with both Makayla’s and Destiny’s fair share of creepers…
Nope, Janus had always felt like the real deal. He didn’t love bomb and then suddenly change into someone I didn’t know the second I fell for him. If anything, he became more attentive as soon as we found out about the baby. It was only circumstances that had taken him away recently…
Or was this all just a lot of nonsense I was telling myself because his lips felt so, so incredible on mine as he bore me down to the couch.
“Janus,” I murmured. I meant to say more. That we should slow down. That there was still so much more to discuss. That this had never been our problem. Janus and I had never had any difficulties communicating with our bodies.
It was our mouths that were the issue.
And then, as if to prove me wrong, he began kissing me again.
I’d never had that much experience with kissing, but the way Janus did it, dear Lord. He pressed his plump lips against mine. Ever so soft at first. Once. Then again. Then with increasing pressure until I felt so desperately needy for him.
And only then would his tongue slip between my lips, when I was greedy and gasping for it.
He teased along my inner lip, as if he knew where every pleasurable pressure point was. Almost as if he studied me to know where my erogenous zones were. And he was an excellent student who memorized every spot he found.
For example, when the very tip of his tongue, a wicked little point, thrust forward into the nervy place behind the center of my top lip, a spike of pleasure blasted through my whole body.
I threw my arms and legs around him and writhed. It was a kiss. It was just a kiss but—
He thrust his tongue rhythmically against the bundle of nerves at that spot along my inner upper lip and holy SHIT—
Thank God he was hard underneath his jeans between my thighs because I dry humped him furiously. He had to stretch to get around my belly. He kept up the furious kissing and suckling that spot on my upper lip. He knew what he had and he wasn’t letting go.
I spasmed and hissed and writhed and grabbed his hips and dry humped the shit out of him as he made me orgasm so hard from that fucking kiss alone.
We both laid there on the couch, breathlessly tangled in one another. I think we were each a little shocked at how quickly that had escalated.
And I, an extremely horny pregnant woman, had quickly forgotten all the very grown-up points I had been attempting to make. I grabbed Janus by the back collar of his shirt. Apparently he could see the barely satiated need in my eye. These days with my insane second-trimester libido, one orgasm was never enough.
“Which one’s your bedroom?” he asked, blinking rapidly like he was trying to catch up with events. Hurry up, buddy. Brains off, bodies to the front.