Free If You Dare by Jessica Lemmon

pants.
    Now that would be embarrassing.
    “Will you respect me in the morning?” she breathed, her hands pulling his hair in every direction. He liked it. She laughed again, a throaty, sexy sound. He liked that even more.
    “You’re going to tease me at a time like this?” He pulled his mouth from her nipple and rubbed his chin against it, testing to see if the roughness against her tender flesh turned her on or off. She tightened her hold on his head.
    On. Definitely on .
    He sensed more than saw—since the room was still dark—Lily lift her head from the mattress. “The bet still stands,” she told him, her vocal chords strained from holding her head at the awkward angle. “No matter what we do for the next hour.”
    “An hour? You have a lot of faith in me, Lil.” He didn’t know if he’d last five minutes. And what I’ve got planned will take a day, at the least…
    She ignored him. “This…this exists outside of everything else.”
    Outside of work. Outside of the world they inhabited when they weren’t pawing at each other in a pitch black, purportedly haunted mansion. Despite his efforts not to take the request personally, his heart pinched. He knew Lily didn’t take him seriously, didn’t see any actual dating potential in him. But damn. It hurt to hear her affirm it.
    But. That wasn’t about to stop him from fulfilling a two-year-plus wet dream.
    “Of course.” He’d replay the memories of it. Entertain himself in the shower with it, but he’d never speak of it.
    “Joanie and Clive can’t know.”
    “I’d never tell Clive,” he said, suddenly offended. What kind of meathead did she take him for? He knew better than to ask that question.
    Marcus wasn’t a kiss-and-tell kind of guy. And with Lily… Well, the truth was she meant too much to him. He’d never brag about this to anyone. Maybe to himself…but even that would be hard to believe.
    She palmed his face and tugged, and he obeyed her silent command by sliding up her body to meet her nose to nose. He braced his arms next to her head, moving her hair aside to keep from pulling it. She tried to kiss him, but her lips hit the side of his nose. She muttered a small “oops” before saying the word he’d just prayed to hear.

“Yes,” she whispered, followed with a soft, sweet kiss on his mouth and four more words that threatened to cave his chest in on the spot. “Make love to me.”

Chapter 9
    Lily could feel Marcus’s heart hammering against her chest. Or maybe that was her heart. She’d just given him carte blanche to have his wicked way with her, but he was frozen in place, his breathing tight, his body still.
    “Marcus?”
    His hands found her face in the dark. He brushed her cheeks with the pads of his fingers with so much tenderness, it startled her. His lips hovered over hers, his breath warm against her mouth. “Say that again, McIntire.” His words were gravel-laden and hard, his touch soft.
    She smiled. Why, suddenly, was everything about him making her so…happy? The hot , she understood. The hot was a given. But the happy? Definitely a surprise. She arched her back and wrapped her arms around his neck, brushing her nipples against the course hair on his chest.
    “Make love to me, Marcus,” she whispered. “Please.”
    The urge to giggle was strong, and she squashed it. Not because this was funny. Not because this was kidding, but because of that inexplicable happiness, now coating her body alongside all of this lust.
    And maybe because their banter hadn’t ended at the foot of the air mattress. They’d always teased. They’d always prodded. She liked this holding pattern. There was something familiar about it, and she’d hold on tight if it meant easing into the unfamiliar position they’d found themselves in.
    “Oh, I like when you beg,” he teased back.
    She felt his smile against her lips. Maybe he was holding tight, too. He pulled away from her, and her arms landed with a soft whump on the