“Emma, I can hear the gears turning in your head.”

What is the objective goal of coy behavior? Is it sex? Because I’m thinking that just might be a goal at some point here. Yeah, it is. Sex is my goal. Really hot, make-him-forget-his-own-middle-name sex.

Alaric’s eyes narrow slightly, and he leans back and away from where we touch.

“Emma, are you…are you shivering?” His whisper makes the fine hairs along my cheek stand up.

My body goes full-fledged Benedict Arnold on me and answers him with a silent shudder that ends with a clench in my abdomen.

“N-No.”

Yeah, I will not be taking home any statuettes for that one.

The window we stand by gives off a faintly cool aura, but I am surrounded, cocooned on all sides in his warmth, his scent. He kisses the top of my hair, and I feel him shake his head.

“Listen,” I say, “I don’t know why I overthink things. I want to be in the moment with you. I want to…want to be with you. I’m just…” I stammer, and his features relax momentarily then transform into contemplation, followed by concern. Just like me. That’s what I am. “…concerned.”

He shakes his head slightly. “Enlighten me: This is much different than scared, how?”

I fidget with the straps of my dress. He twists the thin strap around his finger slowly, then smooths it back down, creating tingling pinpoints wherever his fingers contact my flesh.

“Emma, I haven’t treated you quite the way I should have.” He brings his hand to my chin then tilts me up when I haven’t even realized I have looked down. He holds me there and looks into my eyes. I feel myself swallow against the slight pull he creates along my throat.

“How can I be clear with you, to tell you what you need to know?”

I make to open my mouth but my voice fails me because at that moment Alaric turns his face to the ceiling. He kept his eyes fixed upward, suddenly unfocused and unblinking.

“I have never felt like this before…I think I have never felt other than with you. Is that what you want to hear? Or do you want me to say that I’m terrified, too?” His thumb and forefinger close lightly over my chin. “Because I’m not going to be able to give you that.”

“Oh.” My face falls.

“Emma, I am not going to tell you that because I am not scared about us or about being with you. I don’t, however, relish the idea of not being with you.”

My ears perk at a particularly appealing two letter word. “What do you want ‘us’ to be?” I ask.

“Is there even an ‘us’ already, as far as you are concerned? Is there a ‘we’ or…Hell, I don’t really know where I stand with you.” His voice holds a nervous tinge.

How much detail is too much? How in this am I?

I’m in all the way.

As ever. For always.

I run my hands up through the hair at the base of his neck and press his head down to me.

“This should be easy. Natural. It is…us,” I whisper against his lips. “You are here, and I’m here…and we can only show each other the rest.”

And I am done talking. Done thinking.

Done with everything but feeling.

Because there are no worthy words.

I press my mouth to his, and despite the smile I can feel forming on his lips, he presses back, kissing me for what feels like the first time in forever.

This has the potential to be just that: the first of forever.

He breathes in deeply, never breaking our kiss, always in contact. The intake plays along my skin, invisible feathers along my cheek.

As if my entire being exists only where we touch, I notice nothing beyond the silk of lips and heated pulse wherever we touch. All is recollection and recall. Smooth and satin. His tongue runs along my lower lip, then inside. Touches the tip of my own. Then further, further to skim sides, to taste me as I taste the sweet of him.

Yet this is different somehow. My moves are tentative, more so than when we were together before, more so than I have perhaps ever been before. This kiss carries the weight of a year’s worth of acknowledged and answered longing.

Where he holds my face is soft. Reverent. Not so with the hand on my back. It grips. Tight. Nearly hurting. As if he thinks I might evaporate and leave him clinging to mist and air.

It’s as though he is trying to remember and memorize me simultaneously. He seems to want to catalog this moment. Journal it. Hmm. Novel concept…

He’s sharing with me that he is still afraid this will end, that we will end. His kiss tells me that he’s as worried as I am, but that he’s done the calculations. Risk versus reward.

My hands wind their way under his shirt and move along the skin of his back. He moans into my mouth, the sound sliding down my own throat.

We continue to kiss, tongues entangled, never parting. I mean to bring a hand around and run it along his chest—the same chest that has rendered me near mute on all my not quite accidental hotel room barging-in recon encounters—but, instead, I encounter the coarse hair that stretches from the top of his suit pants in a narrowing trail toward his navel. I run my fingers across it, and it becomes my turn to moan.

“Emma,” he says, breaking our kiss and moving only enough to hover over my lips. His breath is warm, his voice a rasp. “Are you sure? I don’t know if—”

“Shh,” I say softly and place two of my fingers on his mouth to silence him. He kisses them quickly before his hand is there and his fingers close around mine, and then he brings our clasped hands to his side. He is still breathing against my mouth; each breath seems shorter, shallower. He seems to quit breathing entirely when he begins to walk slowly backward, gently pulling me by my hand, toward the bed.

By the time we reach it, we have separated enough that I’m able to truly see everything about his face. The point where his throat meets his sharp jaw. The slight turn of his nose. The faint, growing creases near his eyes that beg to be tasted. The light that plays and dances across his features reveals a mixed look of excitement and an unnamed something more.

The room is bathed in silver Christmas moonlight that spills in from the single window across the white sheets, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

We near the bed. He glances away to gauge the distance and, still, I can’t label the look I have been seeing, but I can’t make myself dwell on deciphering it or anything else beyond wanting…and touching…and truly feeling.

And suddenly, it’s happening. Hands in hair. Cradle and crush. Against his chest. Align. More than aware of every breath, of coursing blood, of crumbling walls. He kisses me with a level of intensity that distances itself from all our earlier kisses. I feel him breathe in deeply, as if he is trying to bring all of me into him. His lips, mine.

My mouth. His tongue. He delves, locates the deepest recess of my mouth, stakes his claim.

Fingers, thumbs in deep pressure circles, entangle within my hair. Flat of a palm, small of my back. Lower us to bed.

Us.

He bends, sits, then moves back more, pulling me on top. Unbroken kiss. Reassurance. And his desire for me strains against my stomach.

Tugging, not yet frantic, at sleeves. My dress is a splash on the floor. His palms skid across my waist, back to front. Hand and arms close around me there. Nearly encircle. As though his hands and fingers may stretch and reach completely from my navel around to my spine in glorious, hot pressure.

Moan into his mouth and, now, stunned when the sound returns to me tenfold from him. From inside him. I want him inside me.

Shift against him. Try to retain balance along his length, along his frame.

But, he shows me, it’s not necessary for me to worry about falling off; one leg wraps around my own and secures me to him, his lean thigh aligns with mine, his calf braids against my ankle and foot. He pushes his other hand up between us, shoving his shirt out of the way. Pulling us together as if it hurt not to feel skin on skin.