Free By the Book by Scarlett Parrish Page A

bedroom, your rules , his pause said.
    Georgia’s hand was still on him when he reached the bed, but there would have been something wrong in him lying down first. Though the lamplight was dim, I still saw a chivalric ladies first in his raised eyebrows, the hand lifting hers from his back and gesturing toward the bed.
    Every piece of clothing removed was preceded by a hitched breath, a shudder, a murmur from one of us. Every time Daniel or I moved, the other took his place, making sure that though Georgia sped toward nudity, she was never untouched by at least one of our hands and, more often than not, a mouth.
    I knew where she liked to be kissed; familiarity made me more confident than Daniel Cross for once in my life. His kisses were hesitant and experimental, his touches laden with trepidation and an unspoken is this all right?
    He and I danced around each other, coordinated in our attention to Georgia— you undo the buttons on her blouse; I’ll see to her skirt —though we avoided eye contact. Some diabolical sense of timing meant we worked together though apart, divided by the woman who united us.
    Every time he touched her, combing his fingers through her hair, leaning in for a kiss, stroking his hand down her exposed abdomen, Georgia shuddered. And because we were so close as I spooned her, the pair of us curved like lazy commas against Daniel’s exclamation mark, I shuddered too. The nanosecond’s time delay felt like no delay at all. And that temporal nothing meant Daniel may as well have been touching me for the way I reacted to what he did to her.
    It was an ordinary mattress, no waterbed, but we drifted, killing time that couldn’t touch us. Daniel’s hands and mouth strayed no farther south than Georgia’s waist. His territory claimed, he left me to hold her hips steady against my hardening cock, straining through my jeans, which I only kept on through a childish sense of you first, you first, you first.
    We cast little more than tentative glances each other’s way— if I kiss her here, you touch her there —and had said next to nothing since entering the bedroom, at least to each other. Daniel murmured as he kissed her, brushing the hair off her face with one hand, tracing the unseen ley lines of her body with the other. I didn’t catch all of what he said, but what I did hear were requests for reassurance. He had the uncertainty of a first-time lover, of one who knew others had enjoyed what he did, but they were them and Georgia was uncharted territory. Undiscovered. Virgin, in the most incorrect sense of the word.
    So we didn’t look each other in the eyes, but a few times I watched what his hands did to see the results. Maybe he did the same as I slipped a hand past the waistband of her underwear. I pulled her head back to expose her collarbone. Before he dipped his head to taste it, was it her eyes he studied—or the fingers tangled in her hair?
    It’s time, the disembodied voice that somehow wasn’t me, inside my head, said. Daniel barely touched Georgia’s breasts, fingertips threatening to lift a slightly-displaced cup away from her skin. More practiced, I unsnapped the clasp behind her, and the instant the fabric went slack, he found an already stiff nipple against his hand and a helpless moan at the back of her throat.
    I tugged the bra free and dropped it behind me over the edge of the bed, and the shift in my weight drew her attention.
    “Reece?” The first clear, enunciated word she’d spoken in a lifetime and it was my name. She twisted a hand behind her back, laid it on my thigh. “You should get these off.”
    For a reason I couldn’t fathom, Daniel was the one I looked at. When our eyes met, his brows lifted and the corner of his mouth twitched in the threat of a smirk. Very well. You get to fuck her first . And whatever else he saw in me required his full attention for a few heart-stopping seconds, chilling my blood despite most of it being diverted somewhere a bit