The Lies That Bind

14: Pillow Talk

Kiss me.

Calla's eyes blazed as she reached for him, lowering Cooper down onto the mattress, and he did kiss her then, long and slow and sweet, and Cooper—who'd never been much of a tequila guy himself—found he savored the taste of it on her lips, wanting more, more, more.

She pressed her palm to his chest, and he obediently rolled onto his back, breathless as she straddled him. He slid his hands along the curve of her thighs, looping his fingers through the slim band of her underwear.

He sighed as her lips grazed his jaw, her touch featherlight. More, he thought, running his thumb along the inner crease of her thigh in slow, lazy circles.

"That's...extremely distracting," she murmured against his throat.

"Oh?" He cupped his palms around the curve of her ass and, subsequently, brought them closer. "How's that?"

She moved her mouth to his. "Prick." But they were both smiling, and Cooper, planting a gentle kiss to her lips—once, twice, three times—lifted her t-shirt, his t-shirt, over her head. The sight of her on top of him rendered him speechless.

She stared at him openly, even as he stared at her, drinking her in as he never had before, her body limned in the faint glow filtering through his window. She didn't shrink away from his naked admiration, and she appealed to him all the more because of it. He thought, then, to compliment her—to tell her how truly magnificent she was, but the word fell away in its inadequacy.

He would have to show her instead.

He reached for her, tangling his hand in her hair—God, he loved her hair, he always had, couldn't count the hours he'd spent behind his camera trying to catch it in the right light, never fully satisfied with the results. The pile of photographs he'd kept shoved in a shoebox under his bed had been proof of that.

And so he savored the chance to touch her now, to wind his fingers through her hair and pull her close, breathless as their bodies molded together. She fit against him perfectly, and that pleased him more than anything else.

Mine.

The errant thought was possessive and not entirely true—Calla had only ever belonged to herself and her own dark desires, but as she dragged her hips against his, he wondered if somehow he had become one of those desires. A wild, bold assumption. But the sounds she made when he touched her...

He slipped a hand between her thighs, pressing a kiss to the old scar just below her left shoulder, and he thought again, as he often did, of the words she'd spoken so long ago—I don't want to be invisible.

She breathed his name, a soft, desperate exhalation that drove him on. "I see you," he murmured against her scar, and the sound she made then was like a strangled whimper. When she kissed him again, he thought he might break from the tenderness of it.

"Don't stop," she begged him, quiet and vulnerable as she never was.

Cooper could not deny her. He buried his nose in her hair as she began to tremble, her breath jagged. "I've got you," he assured her, and as she shattered around his fingers, he brought his mouth back to hers, muffling her cries.

The sound of her so undone very nearly drove him to the edge. He groaned, just managing to hold himself in check.

Cooper had been with others before, Lauren and girls whose names he barely remembered—brief encounters that always left something to be desired, something he could never quite name. But this, with her, was as natural as breathing.