“Calder,” I murmured huskily.
Rain soaked our faces, but it was nothing compared to the way lust drenched his pupils, mine overflowing the same.
I dragged my tongue across my lips, clearing the water for the taste of him.
His head dipped lower. Closer. Resisting him—resisting us—was too much for nature to hold back, too.
And then a rip of lightning tore through the sky, illuminating the whole of his face. And there, his vivifying ache that haunted every ridge and dip, every muscle and crease, was so damningly obvious, as embedded in his expression as oxygen in his blood, that I knew what he’d said earlier was true.
“All it took was one look.”
“Come on. We have to get inside,” he ordered in a low voice.
He kept his arm around my shoulders as we jogged into the woods, Calder leading us by flashes of lightning back to our tent.
It was a downpour by the time he zipped us into shelter, both of us panting and our clothes soaked through.
For a moment, he stayed there, unmoving and facing the flap of the tent, like he wasn’t sure that we were completely out of danger, or maybe it was because he knew that we definitely weren’t.
Something in my chest twisted. The hungry ache that had throbbed in the woods now a sharp, wringing need.
“Calder ...” I said softly and stepped closer to him.
The smallest movement sent a cascade of tension from his shoulders all the way down his spine. I imagined this was what it would look like if a human were able to turn to stone. Perfectly still. Entirely unbreakable.
I held my place. My breath. My heartbeat. Afraid if I didn’t, his rules, his restraint, would get the better of us again. And then he slowly turned until our eyes met, like electricity to water.
The funny thing about electricity in water is that if the water is pure, the shock does nothing. It’s when the water isn’t pure—when the water is charged with impurities—that electricity can take hold.
Well, there was nothing pure about wanting my sister’s ex-boyfriend.
Not. A. Single. Thing.
And maybe that was why what happened next wasn’t a singular charge of electric current, but the complete electrocution of all our reservations.
I didn’t know who moved first. All I knew was the moment we collided. My arms grounded around his neck, his hands bracketing my waist. Our mouths fused together, a detonation of lips and teeth and tongue into desire.
I kissed him frantically. Desperately.Wildly.
I’d lost so many people. I couldn’t lose anyone else; I couldn’t lose Calder.Not tonight.
“Fuck, Lara,” he growled, his large hand sliding up to cradle my head, fingers firm in my hair. With a low, helpless groan, he angled my mouth and kissed me hard.
I couldn’t lose Calder, but I did lose myself in that kiss. In the drive and slide of his tongue scorching my senses, in the hot sear of desire and destruction embedding all the way into my bones. I clung to him in the storm, scoring my nails against his scalp and anchoring myself to the broad hardness of his chest.
I’d never felt so not-in-control before—never so at the mercy of someone else—as I did in this kiss. The way he charted the spots that made me tremble and quake, tracked the spots that made me moan. I wasn’t surprised by his surgical-level awareness of the minutiae of my undoing, but neither was I prepared for it.
“Please,” I begged, uncertain what I was begging for exactly but knowing the only word to describe it wasmore.
A second later, Calder slid his hands to my ass and hauled me to him, with him, as he moved toward one of the chairs, sat in it, and pulled me onto his lap.
He could’ve been pulling me straight down to hell and I still wouldn’t have protested. Not if it meant never breaking this kiss.
We dripped all over the chair. All over the floor. Our sopping clothes were stuck to us, and stuck us to each other. But the only thing I felt was the slide of his tongue along mine. The heat of his chest pressed to the painful points of my nipples. And the thick ridge of him intruding against my core.
Whether it was instinct or muscle memory from this morning, I started to rock against him. Along his length. And it wasn’t like adding gasoline to a flame, but cartons of dynamite to a wildfire, pleasure ravaging through every inch of me.
“Fuck.” Calder’s husky rumble quaked over my skin as he slid his hand up under my shirt and pinned it to the damp skin of my waist, guiding my movement.