And when she did, he had a feeling that for the first time ever, he wouldn’t despise the name he’d been given.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHAWN nodded, no longer able to speak. She was concentrating too hard on not losing control and coming on Rhett’s finger. It was too soon. She wanted to draw out the anticipation, but he was so good at setting her on fire, stroking her into hot ecstasy that here she was, struggling to hold on.
It wasn’t just his touch, though he had found her G-spot in about thirty seconds. It was having her hands behind her back. It made her br**sts jut out in a way she wouldn’t naturally do. It made her exposed, unable to fold forward, to embrace, to touch. It made it all about her. That was the most shocking and sensual realization of all. She never would have thought that making herself vulnerable would make her powerful, yet it did.
Sensation was heightened, intensified.
Rhett had slowed his movements to a steady hypnotic glide, moving away from her sensitive spot, but intuitively understanding that if he just jerked away from her entirely, it would catapult her into an extremely unsatisfying orgasm. Breathing deeply in and out, she calmed herself down, regained control of her body, and managed to pick her forehead off his shoulder so she could see his face, gauge his expression.
His green eyes had darkened, and he was watching her with an expression she didn’t understand. It looked . . . tender. Unnerved, she tried to pull away but his hand was still in her pants, his finger still inside her, other hand cupping the back of her head. Holding her firm, he shook his head, just a slight shake of disapproval and she felt a flush of . . . what? Disappointment in herself for disappointing him?
Oh, hell, no.
Now she was really freaked out. She started to rear away from him, full-blown panic rushing over her. Given that her feet were entangled with his and her hands were tied and he was holding her, she ended up stumbling backward and would have fallen if he hadn’t prevented her from going down. Which made it worse. She realized that without her hands to brace her fall, she would have landed hard on her ass, or worse, on her face.
“Shawn.” He gripped her steadily, bent his head to make eye contact, but she couldn’t look at him. “Shawn, look at me.”
She stared at the wall, breathing hard, overwhelmed and confused. If she looked at him, he would see that she was suddenly terrified. Of how he could make her feel. Of how she could easily come to depend on him.
That wasn’t her. She didn’t depend on anyone. Because they would let you down. Leave. Like her father, and in ways so much more hurtful, her grandfather checking out and putting conditions on her inheritance.
Oh, God. Tears rose in her eyes, and one leaked, inching down her cheek, and she couldn’t even wipe it away. She was mortified.
“Baby, talk to me. What’s going on?” Rhett gently lifted her chin, forcing her to look at him. When he saw the tear, he wiped it with the pad of his thumb and then sucked the droplet off his finger.
That disarmed her. “Why did you just lick my tear?” she asked, yanked out of her maelstrom of emotion. Sometimes Rhett was just freaking weird.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just wanted to taste it.”
She gave a desperate sort of laugh. “You’re really bizarre.”
“I know. I’ve never tried to hide who I am.”
No, he hadn’t.
“Why are you crying?” he asked, wrapping his arms around her waist, but loosely, like he knew she would bolt if his grip was too tight.
Which she would.
“I don’t understand what you want from me.”
He studied her for a long, uncomfortable moment. Awkward to her anyway. His stare was intense, as it always was. It stripped her bare, made her long to look away again, to hide from him.
“I don’t want to take anything from you. You don’t need to give me anything. I just want to be with you. Does that make sense?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “It’s just . . . you looked at me and I didn’t get it. It was like you . . .”
Shawn stopped herself. She couldn’t say it out loud. She would feel like an idiot. A presumptuous idiot.
“Like I what?” he urged.
When she still didn’t answer, he frowned, the smooth skin between his eyes forming a deep trench that told her his expression was frequently one of concentration. Which she knew.
“I don’t know what I look like,” he told her. “But I know what I’m thinking. And what I’ve been thinking as I kiss you and touch you, is that you’re an amazing woman and I want to give you pleasure, make you happy. And you know what that means?”
She shook her head. Sometimes it was really hard to believe that Rhett was so much younger than her. He had an easy confidence in who he was, what he said, that she envied. Yet at the same time, he made her feel very feminine, very cherished, something she’d never experienced before.
“It means I care about you. It means that if you believe in fate, it guided us both to that bar that night because we’re supposed to be here, together, doing this. This is right, Shawn, me and you. And you can’t tell me otherwise, because I won’t believe you.”
Oh, God. She had never been particularly romantic, or gushy, or emotionally exposed. But she could have sworn that everything in her just heaved, like her soul sighed in pure bliss. She even heard the exhalation of air from her mouth, a soft rush that proved she did in fact believe him. She trusted him.
That’s what was so scary.
He kissed the corner of her mouth, first right, then left. “Say something, baby.”
She shook her head. “No. Because if I do I might ruin this moment.” It didn’t have to be forever. It just had to be now.
So she kissed him. She reached out and poured her overflowing feelings into a kiss, which he accepted and deepened. As their tongues teased over each other, their moans eager and increasingly desperate, Rhett undid the bra locking her wrists together behind her back.
“I want you to touch me,” he murmured, his voice rough and gravelly.
She wasn’t going to argue with that. Greedily, she ran her hands over the hard plane of his abdomen, over his chest, his biceps. He was so hard, so solid. Like the man himself. There was nothing soft about Rhett, physically or otherwise. Indulging herself, she felt up his ass through his jeans. Equally solid.
When she shifted her touch to the front of his jeans, finding his erection with ease, she was feeling down the length of it, awed by its steely quality, when he broke off their kiss and covered her hand with his.