Total pages in book: 166
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 157273 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 786(@200wpm)___ 629(@250wpm)___ 524(@300wpm)
“You’re still here.” He put his hands on either side of me, trapping me between his arms, then leaning into my space.
“I’m still here.” My gaze dropped to his mouth as I struggled to breathe. I should go, yet I couldn’t bring myself to walk out that door. “What do you want, Hudson?”
“I want that first kiss.” He cradled my cheek and skimmed his thumb over my lower lip. “Do you?”
“It’s a bad idea.” Oh God.
“Do you?” he repeated.
Kissing him—really kissing him—would be totally, utterly reckless, and that word never applied to me. But I wanted to kiss him more than I wanted the safety of my solitude. I looked up into his eyes and unfolded my arms, placing my hands on his chest. “Yes.”
“Allie.” He whispered my name as he lowered his head.
Then his hand slid to the back of my neck, and he kissed me.
Yes. This was exactly what I’d wanted, his mouth moving over mine, with mine, the pressure achingly sweet. He stroked the center of my bottom lip with his tongue, and I opened for him.
He groaned, and we descended into pure madness. He consumed me with deft strokes of his tongue along mine, laying claim to every sensitive line of my mouth and wrecking my carefully constructed world.
My hands rushed over his shirt and around his neck, pulling him closer. Electricity raced across my skin, and I kissed him back with a decade’s worth of longing as heat exploded between us, untamed and dangerously volatile. His grip shifted to just beneath my ass, and he lifted me onto the edge of the sink, keeping his mouth sealed over mine, robbing me of thought and logic and replacing them with urgency and a need I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to sate.
Holy shit, he was good at this.
He parted my thighs and moved between them, bringing our mouths together again and again, weaving his fingers through the hair at the nape of my neck and tilting my head for a deeper angle. A few seconds was all it took for the kiss to spin out of control, and we let it. We pushed it with questing hands and stuttered breaths, too desperate for more to stop for such a trivial thing as air.
I nipped his bottom lip.
He sucked my tongue into his mouth, and I moaned.
I knocked his hat off and ran my fingers through his hair, holding his head against mine.
He skimmed his hand under my dress and along my outer thigh, then grasped my hip, and then he pulled me tighter against him. Oh God. He was hard and hot, and so right there.
“Hudson,” I whimpered, and he responded by kissing me harder, deeper, longer, until I knew his mouth like my own, and the taste of salt and Hudson was branded into my memory.
Yes. So much yes. This was what a kiss was supposed to feel like. How had I lived twenty-seven years without experiencing this kind of heart-pounding rush? This overwhelming hunger? I wanted him. I needed him. He was heat and warmth, and I’d been so damned cold for too long. He could have asked for anything, and I would have given it as long as he didn’t stop kissing me. I wanted to give it, wanted to feel every inch of his skin against mine, wanted him to shove the fabric of my swimsuit to the side and touch me.
I wanted everything.
He ripped his mouth from mine only to kiss a path down my throat, returning to the places that made me gasp, sucking where I moaned. My fingernails bit into the back of his neck as his lips skimmed my collarbone, and I rocked my hips, making us both moan at the friction.
This wasn’t chemistry. This was combustion. And I was here for it.
“So fucking mine,” he whispered before claiming my mouth again.
I hooked my ankle around the small of his back, and his grip tightened on my hip as I kissed him again and again, like I could fit eleven years of fantasies into this single moment.
Eleven years. We could have had this—had each other—for all that time.
But he’d left. Without a word. Like our years of friendship meant nothing.
I cried out at the sudden pain in my chest, and Hudson broke the kiss, both of us panting hard as his eyes searched mine.
“Allie?”
My vision wavered and my eyes stung. “You broke my heart. Maybe we were just friends, but you broke my heart.”
His chest heaved as he dropped his forehead against mine, his fingers gently stroking the back of my neck. “I know.”
“How could you do that to me?” I should have pushed him away, but I tugged him closer instead, like holding on to him now could somehow have forced him to stay back then.
“I’m so fucking sorry.” He pressed a hard kiss to my forehead. “So sorry.”