“What the hell did you say?” Now he sounds like the man I’m used to. Irreverent and hard. “The sheets?”
He fists a handful of Egyptian cotton.
“These sheets?
“They’ve been washed,” I say hastily. “It’s just a trace of his cologne, and I can’t.”
He rolls out of bed, reaches back, drags me out. I land unceremoniously on my rear while he strips the sheets from the bed and strides, surefooted in the near-dark, out of the bedroom with them bundled in his arms.
“Jared.” I scramble to my feet. “What are you doing?”
I check the laundry room, but he’s not there. I hear rustling under my sink, and by the time I reach the kitchen, he’s stuffing a thousand dollars of bedding into a garbage bag. I lean one shoulder on the doorjamb.
“You just tossed a fortune’s worth of sheets in the trash,” I say calmly.
“I’ll buy you new sheets.”
He strides over, grabs my jaw, and kisses me hard, pressing my teeth against my lips. I deliberately soften under him, open my mouth to his, hoping to soothe him with my compliance. At first I’m not sure it will, that I can. Brutal hunger drives him into my mouth, chasing and capturing my tongue. I whimper, reaching up and tangling my fingers in the soft hair curling at his ears and neck, and he changes. He shifts and his hands gentle on my face. He presses his forehead to mine, never breaking contact with my lips.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbles into the thawing kiss. “I know I’m being ridiculous.”
“Hmmm,” I agree, kissing under his chin. “Zo is the only one entitled to outrage in this situation.”
I pull back and peer up at him in the growing sunlight breaking through my kitchen window.
“We’re in the wrong.”
“Are you telling me,” he says, sliding his hands down to the small of my back. “That it felt wrong when I was inside you?”
“No, I—”
“Have you ever felt anything like that before?” He lifts his brows, waiting in my surprised silence for a second or two before going on. “Because I haven’t. Not with anyone else.”
His unexpected confession knocks my answer right out of me, and I blink at him owlishly. He dips to push my unruly bedhead hair back.
“How did it feel for you?” His eyes never leave my face.
Perfect. Right. Finally.
Those are the words that leap to mind when I recall Jared inside of me, moving with the certainty of a thousand times when it was only our first, then only our second. Like in some time hole, behind a secret door in the cosmos, we had been making love to one another since time began.
“It was good,” I say instead, avoiding the probe of his eyes.
“Banner, give me this.” He’s as close to pleading as I’ve ever heard him. “Tell me the truth.”
No one has ever pushed me the way Jared does, demanded my surrender at every turn. I am the resistance, and yet I can’t resist this man.
I drop my forehead to rest against his chin. “God, it was so good, Jared. It was like nothing I’ve felt. You know that.”
“I don’t know. I hoped.” His words melt into the curve between my neck and shoulder. “I want you so bad right now.”
Pressing my breasts into his firm chest is an involuntary response to the desperate need, to the passion roughening his voice. I angle my head to kiss his neck, sucking at the warm skin. He tilts his head, offering as much of him as I want.
I’m losing myself in the taste of him, of his saltiness on my tongue, when “Girl Gang” blasts on the nearby counter. We both jump and then laugh, startled by the loud music shattering the early morning serenity.
“What the hell?” Jared walks over and picks up the device, turning it in his hand and looking for the off button.
“Alexa, stop,” I say, mixing humor in my command.