I gulped an angry swallow down my tightening throat and curled into the growing ache in my abdomen. His words felt alive in a way that caressed each and every one of my senses.

His face pushed closer to mine.

“And I can guarantee when it comes to the minimum for you, there’s nothing mini about it.”

His earnest eyes met mine deliberately, and with the way he said the words, the way his eyes spoke as he did, there wasn’t a thing in the world that could convince me that when Nik said those words to me, there was a single one that didn’t breathe romance.

“Nik.”

“Let me make you feel good, Cal. Just you tonight.” His body trapped mine, pushing me gently back onto the bed until he hovered right above me, his lips inches from mine and affection in his crystal blue eyes. He smoothed the still damp hair from my face and kissed the skin he uncovered by doing it. Slowly, deliberately, worshipping. “Just you coming apart in my arms and you trusting me to be the one to make it happen.”

Goosebumps emblazoned my arms like a finely crafted textile as his words and movements swept over me. My eyes closed of their own accord.

Tender fingers pried the hem of his baggy t-shirt away from my body languidly, skimming the skin as they went and making my hips sink into the bed even further. Air tunneled under my back as it arched slightly, the feeling of his skin on mine even more electrifying without the aid of sight.

His lips touched each eyelid individually. I felt his breath caress my face when he spoke in a need-roughened whisper. “Trust me to make you feel good, Callie.”

“I do,” I admitted easily because I did. I didn’t know what that meant precisely or how he intended to achieve it, but I knew he’d do his best to take care of me.

Wide hands slid up the smooth muscle of my belly, and his lips moved slowly from the curve of my ear to my collarbone. The neck of my shirt impeded his progress.

Asking silent permission, he lifted and tugged at it, bringing it to the line just beneath my bare breasts and stopping. The material bunched and billowed, and the halt in progress made me itchy with need.

Knowing he wouldn’t go any further without my okay, I lifted my arms and granted him the room he needed to remove the barrier of cotton.

I opened my eyes when it cleared my face so I could watch his as he took in all of my exposed skin.

Eager and unfocused his eyes ate up every square inch of surface area, dilating at the sight of my chest. There wasn’t much there to see as far as I was concerned, but he didn’t look like a man unfulfilled. He looked like a man starved for the exact meal I was offering.

Lowering his head slowly, he rested his lips in the hollow of my throat and breathed. I could feel them move against my skin like a hundred tiny kisses as he spoke. “You’re beautiful, Calia.”

My full name felt strange and wonderful at once. I expected him to move quickly, but he didn’t. Instead he rested there for long moments breathing along with the rhythm moving in and out of my own throat. But I didn’t feel awkward in the least.

“Nikolai,” I called back, testing out the feel of his full name on my lips and producing a smile on his. They dragged along my skin as they curved, leaving a damp trail and accompanying chill in their wake.

Tweaking my ear briefly with his nose, his hands trailed up the lean line of my sides and settled on the span of my rib cage. My upper body was bigger in base than my middle and my thighs held equally disproportional mass. That was the body of a gymnast.

Traveling lips ghosted the line of my neck and down my chest, zeroing in on my nipple and sucking before I had time to prepare. Sparks flew in a direct line from there to the ache between my legs and deepened it. I expected relief in his pursuits but didn’t find it, instead feeling myself build higher and higher into a frenzy with each thoughtful lave of his tongue.

His fingers toyed at the waistband of my shorts playfully before diving underneath to stroke the skin. I found myself wanting his hand to travel further, wanting his fingers to toy with me rather than the waistband. I didn’t have a ton of experience, and part of that had always ashamed me. It had always felt like a disadvantage to make it to twenty-six years old with only one crappy sexual experience to count, but it didn’t feel that way anymore.

This man and place were right. I wasn’t fully convinced about the timing, but the more he did and the closer he got to my sex, the more I came around to that thinking.

His lips came back to mine at the exact moment his fingers found my clit, and the combination made me feel like I’d go blind.

Stars and blackness alternated behind my lids at random, and the caress of his tongue on mine made the time needed comically short.

With a moan I hadn’t known was possible, I came apart just as one of his long fingers settled inside me. It didn’t feel invasive or foreign. It felt welcome.

And my body reacted accordingly. Sucking and milking it in an effort to pull it deeper, my sex sought to keep his finger there, probably forever if possible, and clenched at the girth of it with release. Fire burned through my body and all voluntary function ceased to exist. Only Nik and my pleasure could change the way I acted in that moment.

“God, Cal,” he breathed into the skin at my neck, tucking his face there and inhaling my scent. His body shook on top of mine and his hand made no effort to retreat.

When my hands found the will to move again, I put them to his back, scooting his t-shirt up and smoothing them over his slick skin in an effort to get closer.

I cringed at the rough and ragged feel of my touch, immediately withdrawing my hands in embarrassment.

He noticed the retreat and made an accompanying one of his own, but only as to position himself so he could see my face.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Callie,” he protested, putting one gentle finger to the curve of my chin.

“Something changed. What is it? Did I make you uncomfortable—” he surveyed with worry, breaking me nearly immediately with guilt.

“No. Nik, it’s not that. I…that was wonderful.” I closed my eyes tight against the shame before opening them to my admission at once. “It’s just my hands.”

“Your hands?”

I searched for the words to explain, and he waited patiently until they formed. “I’ve been fighting for this. Fighting and clawing and scratching for nearly my entire life.”

He nodded along, confirming that he’d followed me along my nonsensical path from hands to gymnastics. The best part was that he wasn’t just appeasing me. It seemed to make sense to him too. I lifted one hand in front of our faces and studied it.

“And sometimes I feel like all I have to show for it are these battered hands.”

“Your hands aren’t battered,” he denied in a whisper.

“They’re not?”

He shook his head and reached out to rub his thumb over the brutalized skin of my rips.

“They’re beautiful.” His eyes left the motion of this caress and lifted to meet mine. “Mental and physical toughness. Determination. Dedication. Hard work. Someone I want to know. Those are the things your hands say to me.”

Drugged on the high of my night with Nik, I didn’t think about what would be waiting for me at home after I dropped him back at the gym to get his motorcycle, gave him one last kiss, and headed there.

I moved with the invincible mindset of a teenager for the first time, and it had only taken me seven extra years to get there.

The time was late but not obscene at a quarter past ten, and the lights were largely extinguished on the interior of our house as I pulled in the driveway.

I guess that’s why the harsh sound of my father’s voice calling out to me as I walked in the door nearly sent me into cardiac arrest.