Window Shopping(61)

With a deep breath, I shed my clothes. Dress, underwear and tights. I trade them for one of Aiden’s Tshirts, a white cotton one with a little bumble bee over the pocket above some script reading Aiden and Hank’s Honey Bank. Breathing through the tug in my middle, I make a pit stop in the ensuite bathroom to pee, wash my hands and finger brush my teeth. After making some kind of sense out of my hair, I follow the scent of coffee toward the kitchen.

Where I find a shirtless Aiden cracking eggs into a bowl, his hair wet from a shower.

Who knew so many muscles were required to flex to perform that domestic activity?

His back is wide up top. Thick with muscle, along with his upper arms. Smooth. There’s a scattering of freckles down his spine that makes my mouth water even more than the coffee. From my vantage point, the breakfast bar is blocking him from the waist down, so I take several steps to the right until, dear sweet Jesus, his derriere comes into view in a seriously thin pair of pajama pants and heat coils up inside of me like a spring.

“Wow,” I whisper.

Aiden does, indeed, have a bubble butt and that fact is so much more obvious without the advantage of dress pants and a jacket to hide it. Until meeting this man, I never fully understood the human fascination with butts, but I get it now. I’m a believer. At least in this particular set of taut, brawny buns. He should enter it into some kind of booty pageant.

A twinge of jealousy catches me off-guard.

Oh great, now I’m jealous of the imaginary judging panel of a butt contest.

My life has taken a serious turn.

And when I walk into the kitchen and Aiden greets me with that gigantic heart in his eyes, I decide I don’t hate the turn it has taken. Not one bit.

I’m deciding whether or not to kiss him good morning—is that too much too soon?—when he sucks in a breath and drops an egg on the floor. Splat. Yoke and egg whites everywhere. “Shoot. Sorry.” He turns in a circle, eventually locating a roll of paper towels. “I just…you did something to your hair. Your bangs are pinned up.”

My stupid heart is clunking like a car with cinderblocks for wheels. “Oh, um…yeah. They’re messy in the morning, so I twisted them back.”

He seems to have forgotten about the broken egg on the ground. “Your eyes look bigger. You look…oh boy. Wow.” He comes toward me in a daze, stepping right in the egg, seemingly without realizing it. “Ahh sweetheart. You’re wearing my shirt, too.”

Tingles run the entire length of my body when he just keeps coming, closer and closer until our mouths are locked. Peppermint and spicy deodorant envelops me, his full lips slanting over mine, those big hands settling on my hips, tugging me close, my head tipping back to maintain the kiss—a kiss that immediately grows desperate. Eager. We break apart to draw in a shuddering lungful of air and dive back toward each other with a groan, tongues twining together, his fingers gathering the hem of my shirt, stripping it off and tossing it away.

His hands run over every inch of my naked body, memorizing every swell and valley, every spot that makes me whimper. And when they find my backside with a rough squeeze, jerking me up onto my toes, it occurs to me that my hands have carte blanche, as well, and I should definitely be taking advantage of that.

Head swimming with anticipation, I rake my palms down his heaving sides, traveling around to his hotly muscled back and down. Oh yes. Down. I plunge all ten of my digits into the waistband of the pajama pants and grab hold of that glorious bare butt—and oh my God, if possible, it’s even better than I imagined. To the naked eye, his buns look hard as boulders, but not so. Not so. There is some definite give. Some extra flesh that makes it even hotter.

I moan into his mouth and knead him hard.

But my eyes pop open when Aiden breathes a laugh into our kiss.

“You enjoying that, Stella?”

“Yes,” I say honestly, trailing my middle finger down the split of his cheeks. On the way back up, I press a little deeper and Aiden’s eyes darken, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Between us, his sex turns noticeably bigger. More erect. “Am…I supposed to be enjoying this?” I whisper.

“Believe it or not,” he rasps. “I was just asking myself the same question.”

What exactly we’re doing isn’t clear, I just know neither one of us has been here before and the shared unknown drops an anchor of lust in my stomach. I’m confident with Aiden, missing my usual self-consciousness. And it feels ten kinds of right to go down on my knees in front of him. To untie the drawstring beneath his navel and tug down the garment to mid-thigh, revealing his arousal to the morning light. Feeling his fingers sink into my hair and grip. I’ve never done this. I don’t know what I’m doing. But the light being cast on Aiden somehow makes me braver, because it hides nothing. There are springy hairs and ruddiness and moisture pearling on the tip. Human. We’re both human in the daylight. Two people who want to give each other satisfaction and I will figure out how to do that for him because, right now, it’s the only thing I want in life.

“Stella,” he begins thickly. One second he’s guiding my mouth toward his hard flesh, the next he’s using my fisted hair to hold me away. “No. You can’t. I’m…we didn’t, ah…relieve each other last night. And that’s totally okay, sweetheart. But I’m so sensitive now. You understand? I almost came when you walked into the kitchen with your bangs off your forehead.”