Free Live (The Burnside Series): The Burnside Series by Mary Ann Rivers

instantly melted when she gathered it, and now it made her thumb drag and slip and she rubbed up and down.
    It would be better if she could use her tongue.
    She forced herself to pull her hand away and met his eyes. He was squinting, and now she knew what he might be thinking when he looked at her like that. He was thinking it would be better if she had used her tongue.
    “You get it?” His voice dropped into that near-whisper range.
    “Yeah.” And without even thinking she cleaned her thumb with her mouth, the thumb that had just left his mouth. It was sweet, but there was another flavor there, too. She felt the prickle of millions of capillaries open in her face, to rush the blood through, but she also felt a tight and pinching prickle in her nipples. Between her legs.
    “God, Destiny,” is what he said. It fit. He watched her thumb in her mouth and called on God, then whatever else might happen.
    He reached up to the corner of his mouth where her thumb had rubbed and touched the place with his fingertips. She didn’t let herself look away from his eyes as she drew her thumb completely from her lips. Then, because her body told her there wasno choice, none at all, she slid her arm across the tabletop and wrapped her hand around his wrist. She gripped it hard, as a counterpoint to the pressure in her chest, in the lowest part of her belly.
    Then she felt his hand grip her wrist, like she was readying to haul him from the edge of a cliff. His hand was rough and coarse, exactly as she imagined. Bigger though. Hotter. He easily encircled her wrist and upper forearm.
    His squint widened into one of his deep, soft looks, and now she knew what that one meant, too. That he was moments from closing the distance between them. She didn’t care what gap narrowed first—the one between their bodies or the one between their lips and necks and cheeks.
    She leaned forward, and the hand near his mouth left it to meet her body and grip her shoulder.
    It felt like they were holding each other down. The wind over the knoll had picked up and if not for the four points of warm contact they made on each other’s bodies, they would blow away.
    She wanted to explore his arm, his wrist, his hand, but something about the way he gripped her, pinned her, argued against moving at all. Even a little. She didn’t feel like squirming, or restless. She felt expectant. She felt as if she was vibrating at some resonant frequency from her thighs to her chest and it was rearranging everything inside.
    Then she did drop her gaze from his. To his mouth, to the jut of his upper lip, that strange upside-down mouth of his she wanted to feel everywhere. Licking his thinner lower lip had become an obsession now, and as soon as she had the thought, his thumb over her wrist started up, back and forth, and the hand on her shoulder gripped tighter.
    “You licked your lips,” he said, his voice cracking. The words penetrated the heavy vibrations in her middle and forced them lower, focused them. She wiggled now. She couldn’t not wiggle.
    “I want to lick yours, I think.” She whispered, too. Wiggled a little more in his grip, lost one whole side of her body to goose bumps because of that thumb rubbing and scratching over her wrist.
    “The first day I saw you in the library you had your brown coat on, the one with the dolphin patch on the elbow.” He moved in so that he said this to her cheek, but not close enough so that anything else touched. She kind of blanked out with his words. He’d been watching her, too.
    “There’s a hole there, in the elbow. That’s why I sewed on the patch.” She couldn’t believe she couldn’t think of anything better to say, but it seemed more important to breathe in the smell of his neck, to lean into his grip so he knew he would meet no resistance from her.
    “Your hair was in two plaits, one behind each ear. And you were wearing big snow boots. You slid a little, in a puddle of melted snow, and I steadied you, at