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.
His big hands engulf my bottom as he hauls me closer again, his eyes brimming with need, gobbling up my features, and drowning me in their depths.
“This is my requisite with you.”
A flash of wild need rips through me as I realize what he’s telling me.
He won’t take me yet.
Even when it’s all I think about. All I want.
Today, it’s daylight, and I’m still living in the last bed I was in, with him, with his mouth devouring mine.
He wants me to know him, and I want to know him, but if I know him and like him just a little bit more than I already do, our emotional connection will be too strong for me to ever go back to the way I was before him.
He’s powerful, physically, but emotionally, he demolishes me.
I can’t take much more of this. And neither should he.
Feeling an odd heaviness in my chest, I lean into his ear and whisper, “We still can’t keep this up, Remy. Not when your championship is on the line. So you either come get me tonight to make love to me, or you leave me alone so we can both rest.”
I expect this threat to have more of a reaction. He’s a man. This is an open invitation to uncomplicated sex, just what men want. I’m making it easy for him, basically accepting him “as is,” no more questions asked. He will either work it out in bed with me and be able to train tomorrow, or he’ll have a restful night of sleep without me. And I hate that he doesn’t seem budged to the make-love option which was honestly the one I was praying he’d go for. Instead he studies my face with eyes that I notice are definitely, definitely, not blue today.
“All right,” he says, with a smile I’m not quite sure reaches his eyes. He sets me down on my side, grabs his iPod, clicks his own music, and doesn’t give me another song.
So now I guess I won’t be sleeping with him either.
Wow.
I think I just broke my own heart.
We’re in Los Angeles now, and the weather here is so blessed by the gods, I just want to be outside all day. Diane and I are roommates again, and we love having breakfast in our little balcony.
In fact, ever since we arrived at chilly Denver almost a week ago, we were back to sharing quarters after my idiotic make-love-to-me-or-die ultimatum to Remy. Although I was totally forlorn to realize I was no longer his roommate to be deliciously taken at night, Diane was so excited when we got to our room, she actually leapt over and hugged me. “You should room with me more often, you!”
Turns out Remington booked us a presidential suite like his, and we each had our own room, with a shared living room and dining area. I still didn’t know if I wanted to sigh, or laugh, or cry, that’s how wound up he’s got me.
That evening we arrived, I remember his body in my hands, his sweaty bare skin under my fingers, and it was all I could do to keep my pulse under control as I rolled and rubbed the firm, lean nape of his neck. I edged closer to whisper in the back of his ear, “Mind telling me why Diane and I are in a suite, Remy?”
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.
If I were a little less confident, I’d be experiencing all kinds of complexes right now.
I’m even wondering if my body is no longer attractive with the little fat I’ve gained the past years. Maybe my hair needs a new cut other than the plain length I wear it. I might wear bangs. Or add some highlights?
“Stop staring at yourself, you look amazing in anything you wear,” Diane tells me this morning when she catches me checking out my butt in the full-length mirror at the entry of our room.