Neve Wilder

“How about now?” he asked.

“That’s not handholding. That’s like… hand fucking. Or hand seduction. Your hand is seducing mine, and my hand has zero game. It’s just gonna hop in the bed with yours without even dinner or a drink first. Maybe I need to give it a lecture about standards.”

Eric threw his head back and laughed. “All right, maybe, yeah, your hand is a total slut. But do you like it better?”

Nearing critical level, all warning signs for impending explosion flashing and ringing in my mind, I bucked against his hold to no effect. “Eric!”

“Love when you curse me using my own name.” He chuckled softly and released me, his breath ghosting over my stomach, another searing smear of his lips streaking across the muscles and making them tense. “You are the sexiest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I like you like this. So fucking needy. Ready to beg, but not wanting to. All that pride warring against horniness until you can’t take it anymore. And that’s my favorite moment with you, Nate, when you can no longer resist, when that look of yours switches from struggle to surrender.”

“Mmm.”

I shifted on the bed, too turned on for my own good. That mmm, it could mean a hundred things, but what I thought it meant in that moment was that he was still touching himself but I wasn’t allowed to see it. “This is cruel and unusual punishment.”

“For both of us, maybe.”

I laughed because he was just… I didn’t even know. He was outrageous. And I wasn’t sure if I loved it per se, because could you really love something that kept you in limbo between panic and ecstasy? But I was addicted to it. Every agonizing second.

I nodded and swallowed hard, hoping like fuck I wasn’t blushing, even though I felt the creep of heat over my neck and my cheeks. What was it about the way he looked at me that could turn me from tepid to hellfire blaze in seconds?

He was smart as shit, incredibly good at anything academic and creative, whether it was drawing or writing or organic chemistry. And he raised being a sarcastic dick to an art form.

Eric and I got each other on some primal, subdermal level that maybe I’d never fully understand, and I was fucking kidding myself trying to fight it.