Never Sweeter (Dark Obsession #1)(24)

So she grabbed the pillow between them and whacked him with it.

“You did not just hit me with a pillow. You did not, oh my god.”

His tone told her to expect retaliation. It was so jam-packed with faux outrage and unstoppable good humor that it was bound to happen. She just wasn’t prepared for the way it happened. He didn’t whump her back with the cushion to the left of him. There was no wrestling for the pillow still clutched in her fists.

Instead, he went ahead and tackled her.

He got her around the middle and sent her sprawling back across the bed, hands in places she never expected them to be. One was pretty close to her right boob. Another grazed her butt, pretty distinctly. Yet the weird thing was, she couldn’t seem to conjure up any fear. Far from it, in fact: she was laughing as he did it, and even harder when she felt his fingers needling at her rib cage.

He was tickling her.

The bastard was tickling her.

And it was f*cking awesome. He had to be the best tickler the world had ever known. He got her to make the sorts of sounds she didn’t know she was capable of, high and ridiculous and completely abandoned to the moment. Then just when she couldn’t take any more, just when her stomach started cramping and tears were leaking out of her eyes, he backed off. He knelt over the tight little ball she’d made of her body, grinning so wildly she was afraid for his face.

She’d never seen anyone look so purely happy.

Or revel in something so much—because by God, he did. He waited until she had her breath back, all the time asking if she was good, if she was cool, if everything was fine. Then just as he seemed serious he dove back in. He dove, as though she were a big pool of Jell-O and he had the biggest, silliest hankering for it. He even made jazz hands before he did it, and made a noise that got her giggling all on its own. Rargh, she wanted to call it, but was too busy busting a gut to do anything of the sort.

“Stop,” she gasped. “Stop stop stop.”

And he did.

But only long enough to check she didn’t mean it. Then it was right back to turning her spine to goo and her head to mush. Her face was wet from crying—but it was the right kind. The good kind. The kind that felt so amazing she wanted to thank him for it.

Instead, she returned the favor.

The next time he went in, she whipped in underneath his arms. Dug one knuckle into his ribs, until he made the most ridiculous sound in the world. It was a cross between a yelp of outrage and a giggle, breathless and too high. His voice shouldn’t have been able to get anywhere near that octave, but it did. And it kept going when she found his suddenly exposed armpit. As soon as she got her fingers in there he did something even more delightful: he wriggled.

He squirmed.

She had to pin him down, but the moment she did things got way weirder. He absolutely refused to fend her off with his hands—as though he knew how effective they would be. Maybe it even occurred to him that he might hurt her, so instead he buried them beneath his body. He tried to get away just by arching his back and burying his head in the rumpled comforter, and when he did his T-shirt rucked up.

That was a strip of his side and belly that she’d exposed, oddly vulnerable looking and incredibly taut to the touch. She knew because she skimmed it with her palm. She felt his hot, smooth skin and got a hint of more of it—further down and far too close to his ass. His jeans were loose and everything was completely tangled and then suddenly his arm was around her waist. He was turning her over, in a way that reminded her of one thing and one thing only.

When people change position midf*ck.

Hell, her legs were even around his waist. They didn’t mean to be, of course. It was just the result of crouching over him and then being flipped. But still, it was weird once she was under him.

And he knew it, too.

He had been laughing a second ago.

He wasn’t laughing anymore.

His face had gone all strange and still, and for some reason it was suddenly very close to hers. She could have stuck out her tongue and licked his lips. For a second she even thought he might do that to her—as a joke, of course. Only she wasn’t sure it would feel like a joke. The air between them was too thick; the silence was too intense. It seemed like a secondary presence in the room, getting bigger and bigger until finally she was sure she could feel it pressing against her.

It wasn’t him bearing down on her chest.

It was the incredible, awful, enormous quiet. Slowly but surely it was crushing all the air out of her body—which probably explained why she was hardly breathing at all. Maybe it even explained why he wasn’t breathing, either, though she couldn’t deny that it looked like something else. Anticipation, her mind threw up, and then for some reason her heart just started pounding and pounding. She could feel it shaking her body. It seemed to be in her ears and her teeth and oh god it got so much worse when his gaze dropped.

She saw the fan of his long, dark eyelashes and the smooth gloss of his lids as he glanced down at her lips. And then he looked back up at her, and everything was terrifying. Far too terrifying to take, or understand, or even attempt to process.

She just had to get out of this.

Now. Now. Now.

“You know I just remembered I have this thing.”

The words came out like she’d just cleared a clog in her throat—fast and messy, one tumbling over another to form a single giant sound. Yanojusmemembedthising.