The Chemistry of Love(93)

Wanted me.

“Dark red,” he murmured. The roughness of his voice made electricity zip through me, lighting up circuits I didn’t know I possessed.

“Yes.”

“And we’re alone.”

Technically, we were in a house full of people, but still I said, “Yes.” That seemed to be the only thing I was capable of saying. I was going to be in big trouble if he started asking other things. Yes, I’d go upstairs with him to our room. Yes, I had forgotten all about his brother.

Yes, I’d fallen in love with him.

That last one was a revelation to me, especially given how hard I’d fought it. But it was true. I was in love with Marco.

That feeling overwhelmed me and compelled me forward. I had to kiss him. I couldn’t tell him that I loved him. He didn’t feel the same. I knew he didn’t. But I could have this moment with him, this kiss, before reality had to intrude. Because I knew this would end. Probably badly, as Catalina had predicted. And not because we were caught or Craig found out about our plan, but because I had been stupid enough to fall for the best man I’d ever met.

He made a noise in the back of his throat when my lips pressed against his. I wanted to go for it, be reckless.

But, like always, I could sense how he was holding back. Like there was a bridge he wouldn’t pass over, a line he wouldn’t cross. I wanted it gone. The bridge blown up, the line washed away.

I pulled back so that I could look at him straight on. His eyes opened slowly, confused. “Could you kiss me like you mean it?” I asked.

“What would that look like?” It felt evasive, and it was annoying.

“I have to do everything around here,” I grumbled, wrapping my arms around his neck so that our bodies were pressed together. I had, admittedly, been more of a passive but eager participant in the past. Mostly because he overwhelmed me, but tonight?

I planned on being incredibly active. I was more than willing to take the lead, and judging from his response, he was happy to let me. I set my glasses on the back of the couch and then climbed into his lap to kiss him like I meant it.

He groaned and opened his mouth beneath mine, and the amount of victory I felt—it was better than my first successful batch of the mood ring lipstick, and I didn’t know I could feel more triumphant than that.

Whatever resistance he’d been holding on to for whatever reason—that quickly came tumbling down. He was intense, heated, wanting. His kisses were raw with a ruthless need that was shocking. I had known this was there—lurking beneath the surface—I just hadn’t been prepared for how incredible it would feel. Knowing that he wanted me as much as I wanted him. The way it would send lightning singing through my veins.

I registered that we had shifted, and I was lying against the couch with him on top of me. But whether he’d pushed me back or I had pulled him down, I wasn’t sure, but either way, neither one of us seemed to mind.

His kisses were fiery, demanding, and utterly consuming. It was like he had turned into a fallen electrical wire, buzzing and moving, too dangerous to touch, likely to overload my nervous system and destroy me. The electricity he sparked spread outward through me in a circular pattern, like a pebble being thrown into still water. The high voltage of his touch seemed to increase as those circles grew. He kissed and kissed me, in long, hungry strokes.

Then suddenly he stopped kissing me, and it was like being unplugged. I hated that he’d stopped, and I tried to protest.

But he had simply moved his lips across my cheek, up to my eyelid, down to my jaw, and then farther down to press soft kisses along my neck. Some perverse part of me wanted to remind him that there was no lipstick to test in any of these new locations, but the rest of me told it to shut up.

“Do you think we should pace ourselves?” he asked against my skin before he softly pressed the tip of his tongue against the pulse point in my neck, and my eyes rolled back in my head.

“Do you want to pace yourself?” I asked.

“Not particularly,” he said before he kissed my pulse with his mouth. My erratic, unstable pulse that was liable to give out on me.

I wondered how it was possible to feel so charged and so hazy at the same time. While he continued to explore my throat with his mouth, I tugged on the back of his shirt to get my hands on some of the muscles I’d been dying to touch. When my skin made contact, it temporarily halted his movement, and he took in a sharp breath. His skin was warm and soft and oh, those rigid muscles of his. A girl could devote her life to this particular field of study.

Then he was kissing me again with that wild abandonment that made me feel like my brain was having a heart attack. Or a series of mini strokes. This wasn’t butterflies that I was feeling in my stomach, though. It was eagles. Massive Lord of the Rings eagles flapping with their giant wingspan. And not just in my stomach. In every organ, under every patch of skin I possessed.

A tight electrical knot formed in my gut and begged to be released. Somehow, he deepened our kiss, making me feverish and frantic.

Simply put—a combustion reaction in chemistry was when something reacted with oxygen, and it released energy in heat and light as a result. That was my reaction with him. Completely combustible.

But a nagging part of my brain reminded me that Marco didn’t know everything about our situation, and I felt like he should. Stupid guilt getting in the way of everything.