CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BRANDON

“I never wanted to be friends,” I confessed, grasping onto her hands. “I’ve wanted this since I first met you.”

Her dark eyes held mine. “Then why didn’t you say so? Why did you tell me you couldn’t be with me?”

I sighed, dropping my gaze from hers. “Because … Because I haven’t felt this way in a very, very long time, and it scared the shit out of me.”

I wondered if I should have taken the opportunity to spill the details then, but all I wanted was to selfishly enjoy that time on the staircase before bringing it all down on my head. I would tell her, but after I got to enjoy a few more moments as plain old Brandon.

She nodded, pulling her hands from mine and pressing them against my bare chest, sniffing lightly as her eyes watered. “It scares me too.”

I smiled, my own eyes growing dewy under the heaviness of the emotional atmosphere. “For the love of God, please don’t fucking cry right now.”

We laughed together, the sound breathing fresh air into the room. Her hands moved from my chest to my face, a palm pressing against each cheek and instinct told me to mimic.

“You know, believe it or not, I was never really a crier,” she said, her fingers tracing the line of my jaw.

I smiled, my eyes drifting to the lips that were only an inch or two from mine. “You sure had me fooled.”

She giggled. Music to my ears. “You should take it as a compliment, actually. I rarely cry around other people.” Her hands moved to the back of my head, her fingers tickling against the ends of my hair.

“Oh, gee, I’m so honored,” I laughed.

She widened her smile. “You really should be. It’s just kind of—”

“Holly.”

“What?”

I pulled her towards me and my lips brushed against hers as I spoke. “Please, shut up.”

My mouth was once again on hers, and it was a kiss like the others we had shared, but there was something new: freedom. The freedom to express ourselves without worry of how the other would respond. The freedom for her fingernails to rake along the contracting muscles on either side of my spine. The freedom for my eager hands to move along her neck and down to the bottom of her sweater. The freedom for my aching erection to press against her without any worry of how she might react.

My fingers curled under the soft hem, tugging gently to urge her to lift herself, and she responded with a gentle bite against my lower lip as her hips raised from the step with the simultaneous lift of her arms. I held my breath as I pulled the garment off her body, revealing first her supple hips and the softness of her belly; then the faint outline of her ribcage, her skin pulled taught over her lovely bone structure; and finally, the appearance of her bra, red and lacy in design. My arms raised with the sweater, pulling it along until it was free of her hands and I threw it to the floor, resting with the t-shirt I had borrowed.

I held her hands in mine, bringing them down to rest between us while my eyes took her in. I couldn’t spend enough time memorizing every last inch of soft, alabaster skin; so perfect and statuesque, she hardly seemed real.

“I really don’t feel worthy,” she laughed, her cheeks flushing at my eyes’ interrogation of her body. My fingers traced the length of her inner arms, lightly running their tips along the sides of her waist, bringing her to laugh, and over the ridges of her ribs until my hands could form to the underside of her breasts. She sighed, lolling her head slightly to one side. “Maybe I should join a gym. Then we could be even, providing I can stay away from the doughnuts.”

My hands dropped from their new favorite place and I raised my eyebrows in bafflement at her remark. I shifted our bodies, positioning her against the nosing of the step and I was facing her, between the outstretched legs that boasted gloriously meaty thighs that gave way to slim calves. I knelt on the floor, holding one leg in my hands, and found the zipper that ran along the inside of her boot. I pulled it down, freeing one foot from the leather confines.

“Do you know how hard I have to work to look like this?” I asked her, pulling off the sock. Her lips twisted with disgust before giggling as I brushed my lips against the sensitive flesh on the top of her foot. “I have to take time out of almost every single day to make sure I get my ass into my gym, and I spend about an hour in there—sometimes more—just to look like this.”

I placed her foot down on the floor, and lifted the other leg, resting her booted foot in the hollow of my neck while my hands took their time committing every last curve of her thigh, knee, and calf to memory. “Then of course I have to make sure I run, especially with the way I eat, so that’s another chunk of time spent.” My fingers had made their way to the second boot, and removed it with just as much ease as the first.

“It’s not just your body, though,” she replied softly. “It’s everything. All of you is like …” It was my turn to feel on display, her eyes working their way over every inch of me. “Art. I mean, your body is amazing, but it’s the tattoos and the hair and—” She shifted uncomfortably on the step. “And you’re obviously well off financially, and God …  you treat me better than anybody ever has.”

I laughed through my sudden stroke of bashfulness, and slid my hands over the outside of her calves, up the curvature of her thighs, and to the waistband of her leggings.

“I can’t speak for everything. I didn’t ask to be this devilishly handsome,” I laughed and my fingers played with the thick cotton as she rolled her eyes. I gave the pants a gentle tug and I was rolling them down, my eyes immediately falling on the lacy red panties that matched the bra she wore. “But everything else is the image of many hours of work—and I treat you the way you deserve to be treated. There’s nothing special about that, but you …”

I pulled the leggings off one leg at a time and threw them aside. Shamefully, I had a glimpse of Julia in my mind’s eye—the last woman I had slept with more than five years ago in the past—and perhaps my memory had been purposely putting an ugly spin on the way things were, or perhaps I was simply blinded by the strength of my feelings for the woman lying before me. But in that moment, all I knew was the greatest painters the world has ever seen would have felt blessed to have had the opportunity to lay her imprint upon their canvas.

All I knew was I had never felt my heart threaten to burst under the pressure of being so much in love with someone as it did in that moment—and I was the luckiest man alive.

“You,” I continued, leaning forward and holding onto her hips, “don’t have to do anything.” I placed my lips against the inner thigh of one leg, and then the other, bringing her to utter a sound somewhere between a whimper and a moan. “You can wake up in the morning and throw your hair into a ponytail without even brushing it.” I kissed against her lower belly, just above the waistline of her panties. I was rewarded with another moan, deeper and throatier than the first, and a hand on the back of my head. I ignored her protesting groans as I went further up along her body, to bring myself face to face with the breasts that were rising and falling with anticipation of my next move.

“You can throw on a pair of yoga pants with holes ripped along the seams and a sweatshirt with way too many stains.” My lips brushed against the top of one breast, lingering a little against the pillow-like softness before moving to the next. “You can have on smudged makeup from the day before because you forgot to wash off.”

I kissed along her collarbones and up the delicate architecture of her neck to her ear, where I allowed my teeth to take part in the fun, before raising up on my arms to look into her eyes. “You can do everything you possibly can to make yourself invisible to everyone else, but my eyes will always find you and I will always see the most breathtakingly gorgeous woman I will ever look at for the rest of my life.”  

I hadn’t intended to make her cry, but the tears flowed down the sides of her face freely, and I asked her what was wrong as I tried to keep up with their falling.

She smiled, taking my face between her hands, and shook her head. “I’ve never been enough for anybody. Fuck, I wasted years of my life on a relationship with a man who wouldn’t even touch me. He needed to find a man to finally get what he wanted.” She laughed between sniffles. “If all I had to do was throw on some dirty clothes and maybe shower once in a while, I would have done that a long time ago.”

I lost myself in the ocean of her watery eyes, my hands gripping the back of her head, tangling my fingers in the net of her hair without any desire to set myself free. And not knowing what moment could ever come that close to being right, I bent my head forward, resting my forehead against hers. “Can I tell you something?”

The question brought another burst of nervous laughter. “Yes.”

It all felt like a dream suddenly, or something of an out of body experience. I held her hands in mine and bent my head to kiss her fingertips, treasuring each of the slender digits with the acknowledgement that it might not all last forever, but Christ … I could hope.

Our near-naked bodies pressed against each other on the stairs, warm with anticipation and affection, and I hovered my lips over hers, so close I could taste the remainder of wine on her breath. “Holly freakin’ Hughes ... I’m very much in love with you.”

“What?” she asked, her breath coming in short gasps. She forcefully used her hands to move my face to look me in the eyes, as if trying to seek the truth in my words, as if the only reasonable explanation was that I had to be lying. “Are you serious?”

My response was to sit up and pull her with me, kneeling between her bent legs. I grabbed a hand, and brought it to my chest, placing it over the heart that seemed to only beat her name. “This,” I said, pressing her hand firmly against my chest, “is yours. It has been yours from the moment I first laid eyes on you, and no matter what happens tonight, it will be yours until the day I die.”

Her arms flew around me, nearly knocking me off balance. I enveloped her in the strength of my arms and buried my face in her neck. “Oh, my God, Brandon,” she mumbled against my shoulder, her lips moving against my skin. “I love you. I love you so freakin’ much. I don’t even know when that happened, but … oh God, I love you.”

I held her to me and focused on the pounding of my heart, beating against the flesh of her chest. She loves me, I kept telling myself, and I knew that to be the truth. Tiny tremors worked their way from my chest to my throat as it settled in that she not only meant the world to me but I to her, and what a fucking idiot I was to have held it all off for so long.

“I have to talk to you about something, Holly,” I croaked through a dry throat. My mouth moved against her neck, and she sighed at the touch, working her hands into my hair. My body responded to the gentle tugging and despite the deep breathing I had been exercising, I couldn’t fight back the part of my body that didn’t agree with having a conversation that could prevent what it had been waiting months to do. But still, I said, “It’s serious, and I think it should happen now.”

Against my neck, she shook her head. “No, you’ve been calling the shots for too long. Tell me whatever you want later, but I want this now.”

One hand left my hair and the fingers trickled like water around my neck, down my chest, and past the waistband of my jeans. I groaned inwardly at the soft warmth of her fingers against the evidence of my rock-hard desire to have her, and the grip around me warranted a sharp intake of breath into my lungs. My eyes closed with the immediate decision that she was right, I was wrong, and nothing was more important in that moment than burying myself between those legs.

With her hand slowly working against me, she pressed her lips against the sensitive flesh of my earlobe. “Okay,” she said huskily, drawing the sensitive skin into her mouth to nibble a little, and I responded with another groan as my eyes rolled upward. “Now, take me to your room.”