Even now, I realize I’ve settled down next to him as close as I can without sitting on top of him, all the length of my pink jean-clad thigh pressing against his jean-clad thigh, and he smiles the dimpled smile that curls my toes, because I think he likes me to be close to him too. He takes off his headphones, and then ducks his head to me, as if silently asking me to tell him what’s going on.
“They’re worried about you.”
He turns to hold my gaze. “Me or my money?”
His quiet question feels as intimate to me as the whispers he told me when he kissed me in his room last night, when he whispered kiss me back and called me pretty and kept telling me I smell so good.
“You. And your money,” I tell him.
Those dimples come again but only briefly, appearing as if two angels just squeezed his lean cheeks. “I’m going to win. I always do.”
I smile, and when his gaze drops to my smile, an awareness of my mouth seizes me.
My lips feel swollen and red today, raw from his. His eyes darken even more as he studies them, and a shiver rushes through me. I try to stifle it at the same time I fight not to stare back at his beautiful mouth as well, which does look deliciously, gut-wrenchingly pinker and thicker from my kisses today.
“Do you want to run today? To get ready for tomorrow?” I ask him, and it’s taking all my effort to focus on anything but the fire raging inside me.
He shakes his head.
“You’re tired?” I prod.
He nods with sad eyes, his voice low, but not apologetic. “So f**king tired I can barely pull myself out of bed.”
I nod in understanding, because I feel a little of that too. I don’t want to get up. Especially with this enormous muscled man in the same bed, where I just want to torture myself all over again with my wanting him.
I lean back, feel his shoulder against mine resting on the backrest, and I want to curl up like I did last night when we just couldn’t keep up the kissing and caught a couple of hours of sleep. I think he senses I’m tired too, and he shifts slightly so I can rest my head on him.
He passes me a song.
I’m too lazy to pass him any of mine, so I just listen. Norah Jones’s smoky, beautiful “Come Away With Me” begins playing, sensually proposing that I do exactly as the title suggests.
The tone is so sexy and reminds me so badly of our nights together, our stolen moments kissing, that it gives me a fever. Suddenly he leans over to try to listen through my earphones, and when I get a closer whiff of his clean male scent near me, my muscles throb painfully tight. I instantly grab my music, and select a modern song that’s been playing in the radio lately about a boxer who’s strong and fights incredibly hard. I wanted to play “Iris” for him. I wanted to play something to beg him to make love to me. But his team is worried, and I know that whatever we’re doing at night isn’t conducive to good athletic performance. No matter how much I crave those moments and crave what they’re leading to, I can’t sabotage him like this. He’s too important.
I watch his profile as he listens. His expression is unreadable at first. When he finally raises his head, his gaze is dark and troubled. “You play me a song about a fighter?”
I nod.
He tosses my iPod aside with a scowl. Then, he reaches around and grabs my hips. He drags me onto his lap, and my breath goes when I feel how much, how unmistakably, he wants me. “Give me another one,” he demands.
The primal look in his eyes makes me shudder.
I shake my head. “We can’t keep doing what we’re doing, Remy. You need your sleep,” I whisper.
“Give me another song, Brooke.”
He sounds so stubborn that I want to scowl, but it actually … excites me. He wants my songs as badly as he wants my kisses, and it makes me high. All right then. If he wants it, then we need to go all the way tonight and make love, not just jack ourselves up. So I find “Iris” and hand him the song. I straighten and watch his profile when he hears it. He is unreadable once more, but when he raises his head this time, his eyes are torpedoes of heat. His erection is fierce under my lap, and I feel his heart pulsing rhythmically there. In his hardness.
“Ditto,” he says.
“To what?”
His eyes flick up to the other passengers before grabbing my hair and drawing my head down so he can lick my lips side to side with his tongue. “To every lyric.”
I shudder and pull back. “Remy … I’ve never had an affair before. I just won’t share you. You can’t be with anyone else while you’re with me.”
He strokes a thumb across my damp lower lip, his gaze intense. “We won’t be having an affair.”
I stare dumbly, certain I just heard an organ in my body crack in my chest.
His hands clamp around me, and he crushes me to his body as he slides his nose along the shell of my ear. “When I take you, you’ll be mine,” he says, a soft promise in my ear. He slides his thumb along my jaw, then gently kisses my earlobe. “You need to be certain.” His eyes are so hot that I’m on fire with the lust in them, and the word “mine” makes the empty place between my legs swell with longing. “I want you to know me first, and then, I want you to let me know if you still want me to take you.”
The word “take” is also having an effect. I’m just a big mass of quaking need. “But I already know I want you,” I protest.
He looks at my lips with fierce intensity, then into my eyes, his stare so pained and tormented I’m stunned with the darkness I see. He strokes a hand down my bare arm, waking up all the little hairs there. “Brooke, I need you to know who I am. What I am.”
“You’ve had tons of women without this requisite,” I plead.
He let me turn his neck one side, then the other, my fingers lightly resting on his scratchy jaw with a sexy day’s of whiskers, and he never answered. “You can’t do this, Remington,” I added.
But he turned his head slowly, and he touched my lips so that every part of my body remembered having his lips on them. “Stop me. I dare you,” he said, then grabbed his towel and walked away.
I just don’t understand him.
I miss Melanie to talk to.
I wish I could talk to Nora too. She was always my little sister in crush, in lust, or in love with a boy, and I’m sure she would know why in the world an insanely sexy man who’s single and healthy and clearly physically responds to you does not seize the opportunity to have sex with you.