Without a word of warning, he suddenly boosted me up, my dress straining as the material slid up to rest around my hips. Somewhere in the back of my head, I prayed he’d get us to my room fast—really, really fast—before Josh decided he needed to go to the bathroom and found me with my butt hanging out of my clothes, wrapped around Dallas like a spider monkey. Because that was exactly what it had to look like. The instant I was up in his arms, my legs had wrapped around his waist, my arms twining behind his neck. Face-to-face, my mouth hovered inches away from his. Millimeters, really.

And without kissing me, his forehead to mine, his eyes locked on my own, he started walking us down the hall.

One of my hands loosened around his neck to go up to the back of his head, running my fingers through the super soft short hair on his head. Neither one of us said anything as he kept walking, and eventually, I knew we were in my room even with all the lights being off. He kicked the door closed and took a step back, one of the hands he had supporting me disappearing for a brief moment before the low click of the lock being engaged filled the only other sound in my bedroom other than our breathing.

He didn’t turn on the lights and I didn’t bother to either.

Days later, I liked to think we were so quiet because there was nothing that could be said that would have made the moment better or more meaningful. There really wasn’t. Every time his hands touched me, it was like a sentence was being spoken. And I hoped that every time I set my hands on him, he could feel every single thing I thought of him, everything I felt for him.

He was wonderful and I loved him. I loved him more than I thought I was capable of. If I really put it into perspective, how could anything I had ever felt for anyone before him even be close to the “L” word when what we had was ten—twenty, thirty, forty, fifty—times brighter and more real than any man I’d ever met before him?

It couldn’t. It just couldn’t.

Because no one else was as kind or selfless, as giving or as patient, as loving in all the little and the big ways, as he was.

I’d never really known what I wanted most of my life, but this—him—was it.

And as he set me down on my feet in my bedroom, with only the faintest light coming in through the window from outside, his hands went to the bottom of my dress. In one quick move, the dress was up and over my head, gone to another dimension for all I cared. Those cool, scratchy palms went to my waist, and as I stood there in my underwear and a strapless bra, he pulled me into him, pressing my front to his. He sealed us together from the chest down just as his mouth finally decided to meet mine.

Mouth tilted, it opened over mine. Our tongues clashed and stroked. I was faint and dizzy as he kissed me, his mouth slanting from one side to the other as we ate at each other, like it was the end of the world and there was nowhere else either one of us would rather be.

It was the truth.

As he kissed me and kissed me and kissed me—his body warm and fully clothed pressed flushed to my chest, breasts, belly, and even my thighs—all I wanted was to be wrapped around him again. I was so busy sliding my tongue against his that it took me a while to notice him fumbling with the snaps on my bra with one hand. If that wasn’t my cue to get him out of his clothes, I didn’t know what was.

I sucked in a breath as I tore my mouth away finally, going up to the tips of my toes to kiss that warm, almost salty skin at his neck, tiny hairs prickling my lips and chin. Dallas’s hands kept fumbling at my back, and it took me a moment in the dark for my hands to slide up the hard, bulky muscles of his abs, up over his pectorals until my fingers found the buttons near his throat. I got his tie off and threw it before going back.

He got my bra off as I was about halfway down, unbuttoning his dress shirt. His hands stroked over my shoulders and the back of my neck as I finished and started pushing his shirt away, feeling him help me get it off, fast, almost desperately. With only his thin undershirt between me and all those rippled, hot muscles, I sucked in a breath as Dallas leaned down to kiss my upper lip before pulling away. From the sound and the feel of it, he took his shirt off, because the next thing I knew, a bare, smooth shoulder brushed across my cheek.

In the dark, everything felt so much more intense. His thumbs tucked into the scrap of lace at my hips as he tugged my thong down my legs. The kisses he fluttered on the trip down, at the side of my collarbone, my upper breast, the swift suck he gave my nipple once and only once as he kept lowering his body. Another kiss at my ribs and my bare hip. The sound of his knees hitting the crappy carpet told me where he’d ended up.

When he kissed my thigh and followed that up by pressing his warm breath and mouth to the crease where my thigh met the place my underwear had uncovered, I sucked in a breath, loud, so loud. And when he drew a moist line of kisses down and over, before pressing to the cleft at my seam, I swallowed hard and reached for his head for balance or to get him not to go anywhere, I had no idea.

He kissed me there and kissed me there again. He didn’t part me as the tip of his tongue tapped the outer skin and he gave me another kiss. His sigh was deep and rattled as his hands cupped the back of my thighs, gripping them hard, keeping me in place. Then Dallas parted my seam with his tongue, tasting that little knot of nerves that had come alive with the first kiss he’d given me.

His forehead pressed low against my belly, his nose at the skin I’d luckily shaved before the wedding, Dallas kissed me, sucking and licking those lower lips like I wasn’t already dying and ready for him. He made out with me like he had when we’d both been standing up.

Slowly, the hands on my thighs tugged and led me down until I kneeled in front of him. I kissed him, tasting myself on his lips as I moved my hands all over that chest I’d only seen twice in person, then slid them over those rippled abs that shouldn’t belong on someone over thirty. His own hands were at my breasts, pinching my nipples between his index finger and thumb before he cupped them. Dallas’s mouth dropped to take one and then the other between his lips, over and over again.

I squirmed and moved in front of him, dragging my hands up and down his abs again, over the hair trailing to the button and zipper of his dress pants. In no time, I had him unzipped and slipped my hand inside, my palm toward me. The back of my fingers grazed over his short, wiry hair before I felt that thick, hot root at the center of his body. Dallas’s body jerked as I kept sliding my hand inside, feeling his length tucked to the left, nestled against his thigh, and I still couldn’t reach the tip.

Flipping my hand over, I wrapped my palm and fingers around his thick width, and as gently as possible, I pulled him up enough until the tip faced the ceiling. Dallas stopped what he was doing, with his lips parted around my nipple, as I gave him a squeeze. He was just as thick as I’d imagined, and as I slid my palm up and up and up, he was just as long, too, eight or nine inches of swollen cock. His hips jerked and he sucked in a breath as I tightened my grip back up around him and pulled on the excess, super soft skin. Up and down, up and down.

In a quick movement, Dallas pushed me onto my back on the carpet, and before I even managed to let out a breath, he was over me. Covering me like a human blanket, but so much bigger, heavier, and warmer. I didn’t need the light to know the blunt, hard thing poking at my seam was him, ready, ready, ready. “I’m on birth control,” I whispered almost shyly. I wasn’t ovulating either, but I wouldn’t tell him that. Not yet at least.