Brothers of Paradise Series

So I’m surprised when her hands tug at the hem of my T-shirt. I lean back and ask her with a glance, Really? She nods, so I pull it off and toss it into the corner.

Her eyes fall over my chest, a look of quiet appreciation on her face. And that, right there, is enough to make me feel ten feet tall. When we kiss again, her hands roam free. And I hadn’t realized how good it would feel. How much I’ve craved it.

She runs them over my back and I groan against her mouth. Thank God for the elastic waist of my workout shorts tucking my erection flat against my stomach, or she would realize just how much I want her.

Jamie’s hands come to rest on my chest. “Take off mine too,” she whispers.

My hands still on her waist. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

So I find the hem of her tank top and slowly inch it up over her smooth skin, over the sports bra, until it joins my T-shirt in the corner.

“You’re so beautiful,” I murmur, smoothing my hands down her waist. All I see is skin, and the soft swell of her breasts beneath the elastic. “Stunning.”

Jamie shakes her head, almost like she wants to protest, and kisses me again. We end up against the long wall of my garage. My foot hits a kettlebell but the pain barely registers.

Her breasts flatten against my chest and I’ve never hated fabric more than I do with this piece of elastic.

“Parker,” she whispers, hands knotted in my hair.

I nod. Words are too hard to form, and my hand stills on her rounded hip. She’s still wearing shorts.

Can we take those off too?

“Are you in your head again?” I ask.

“A little bit,” she confesses.

I try to think through the haze of desire. Identify the things she’s told me. But it’s hard, so I just lean my forehead against hers and speak the truth. “There’s nothing you can do wrong here, Jamie. Nothing that would turn me off. I’m so hard for you, it’s stupid. I’m like a teenager with a boner.” I laugh at the confession, at the widening of her eyes. “And if you wanted to stop I’d do that in a heartbeat, too. No wrong decisions. But, James? If a single thing in that head of yours is about me and my wants, or doubts about yourself… banish them. You’re all I want.”

Jamie digs her teeth into her lower lip. “I should probably get going. Emma will wake up soon.”

I close my eyes. Struggle against the wave of desire. “Of course, baby.”

“But maybe I should shower first.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to join me?”

It takes me a moment to process her words, to open my eyes. She’s looking at me, and there it is again. The mixture of the strong and the vulnerable.

“Yes,” I say. She’s never been inside my house. Somehow that’s escaped us, and I should give her a tour. But my mind is clouded.

Soap. Skin. Water. And I want her beneath my hands so badly.

“This place is so you,” she says, voice teasing, as we walk through my living room.

“It is?”

“This style of couch, the giant TV. Are those your trophies? Is that from the Junior Regatta trophy?”

I lead her away from the bookcase. “Don’t comment.”

“I never saw you win it,” she says. “Did you lift it high above your head on the docks?”

“Shush, you.”

“Did all the girls swoon?”

“Not you, clearly,” I say and hold the door open to the bathroom. “Are you stalling?”

Jamie looks at me. In her shorts, her sports bra, her braided hair… I can’t fucking wait to touch her again.

“Absolutely not,” she says and steps past me into the bathroom.

I don’t know what happens, exactly. Only that at the end of it I’m standing beneath the hot spray of water in my workout shorts and watching Jamie gently unbraids her hair. It falls in waves around her face. The freckles have intensified, and they stretch across her chest, too. Small, intoxicating patterns I want to trace.

“Parker,” she says.

I swallow. “Anything you want to do. Anything you don’t want to do. It’s all okay.”

She smiles a bit, and nods, and steps into the shower with me. It dampens her hair and turns it dark brown.

It darkens her sports bra, too, the soaked fabric revealing hard nipples. Need explodes in my stomach. I need to get the thing off. And yet I force myself to go slow, to shield her from the spray and kiss her thoroughly… but I can’t stop my hands from roaming. She exhales softly into my mouth and I’m lost, wet skin beneath my palms.

Her fingertips trace my chest. My biceps. Down my forearms. I don’t know that anyone’s ever studied me like this before.ConTEent bel0ngs to Nôv(e)lD/rama(.)Org .

Jamie reaches for the bottle of body wash and it slips out of her fingers, the cap twisting off. We both laugh at it, breathless and heated. And then she’s using her lathered up hands on me. “You’re bigger up close,” she says, running a slow palm over the side of my chest.

“You’re stroking my ego?”

“Maybe,” she says. “You’ve stroked mine plenty already.”

It’s safer to look down, to watch her hands on me, than to watch her own wet body. But even that is sensual. Her hands with the short clean fingernails, long fingers, no rings. They look pale against my skin-she’s not out in the sun enough-as they trace across my abs.

“Jamie,” I say. I don’t know if it’s a plea to stop or to continue. The bulge in my shorts looks obscene against the wet fabric and feels just as painful.

She lets her hands drift to her own chest, and to the band of her sports bra. “Maybe you should wash me.”

“I can do that.” My voice comes out hoarse. And then I see the hesitation in her eyes, remember the things she’s told me. And a sharp tendril of hatred toward her ex cuts right through my dizzying need.

I find her hips and curl my hands around them, the wide hipbones and the soft indents above her waist. No one’s skin should be as soft as hers.

“Don’t be scared, James,” I say. “Not of me, and not of us. You’ve got all the power here. You can see how turned on I am, right?”

Her lips twist, and there’s the flash of fire in her eyes that I love. That I’m used to. She glances down at my workout shorts. “You’re big there too?”