“Yeah,” I say. “I’m in.”
Because Heidi soon texts me that she and Shiner Bock—or Finn as she calls him—are having “drinks” in the hotel room that she and I are sharing, staying with Wyatt tonight becomes inevitable anyway, unless I want to cough up the fee to get another room.
To my surprise though, when he comes out of the shower with a towel slung low on his hips, he says, “Night, beautiful.”
“You’re going to bed?” I ask, surprised.
He stands on his side of the bed with his back turned to me, but glances over his shoulder to cock an eyebrow. “Thought you were tired.”
“Well, I am, but—” He drops the towel, revealing his incredible ass, and now, it’s my turn to lift an eyebrow. “Really, Wyatt?”
He pulls on a pair of boxer briefs before turning around. Grinning, he jerks back the bedspread and stretches out on the oversized bed. What the hell is he doing?
“Come to bed.”
I keep my eyes trained on him as I shimmy my jeans down, pull off my boots, and step out of them. I drag my T-shirt—which smells like booze, cigarettes, and my Betsey Johnson perfume—over my head and drop it beside my pants. “Got a shirt I can wear?”
His gaze dips to the tattoos on my shoulder and then to the big star in the center of my underwear. “Bag on the chair.”
I grab the first thing I can find—a plain white T-shirt that smells like the Tide detergent his housekeeper washes his clothes in—and climb into bed with him as I finish pulling it on. When I move to lie down, he stops me, squeezing my hips gently between his hands.
“What?” I whisper breathlessly.
“How many of those things do you have now?” he asks, a serious expression on his face.
“What things?”
“Those goddamn blackbirds.”
Unconsciously, my hand flies up to the left side of my chest to the tattoos, blackbirds in several different sizes. His T-shirt is covering most of them, but a few are still clearly visible. “Eighteen.”
There’s one for each time things have gone to hell between us and for every time I’ve screwed myself over. Even though they’re not all because of him, my tattoos feel like eighteen tiny reminders of why accepting his challenge to stay with him for tonight and the next is as much of an omen as the ink itself.
Seventeen too many tattoos.
Wyatt inclines his head, and I almost expect him to say something else about the blackbirds, but when he speaks, it’s about sex. How typical.
“I want nothing more than to wrap your legs around my shoulders and fuck you for the rest of the night.” He pulls me on top of him, one leg at a time. “But in all the years we’ve been doing this, not once have I ever just slept with you. I figure if we’re pulling the plug, we might as well do it just once.”
The change of subject is like a fist to my stomach. It’s so painful that it comes damn close to knocking the air out of my lungs. It’s hard for me not to react, but I maintain my composure as I grip his shoulders tightly and lower my face down to his. Our lips graze briefly, softly, and I can’t help but want for more.
“Sweet dreams.” I don’t give him time to respond. I roll off of him and curl up on my side with my back turned to his body.
We’re quiet for several minutes before he makes a noise deep in his throat. “Come closer, Ky. I need to touch you.”
His body finds mine in the dark, and he wraps his arm around my waist. He presses his lips against the tattoo between my shoulder blades—the caged bluebird. He picked it out for me a few years ago when I went with him to Atlanta for his father’s funeral. It was supposed to symbolize happiness, a new beginning, but it hasn’t done me much good.
“This, Kylie, this is how I need to remember you, if you’re not bullshitting about being done with me.”
“I’m not.” I curl my fingers around his hand, but I say nothing. I don’t trust myself to speak.
It doesn’t take long for him to fall asleep. He sleeps hard, soundly, so he doesn’t even flinch when I untangle myself from his body to turn back over to face him. I spend the next hour studying him, running my fingertips gently over his lips and the angles of his face. I etch every detail of him into my memory.
Chapter Three
“Fuck...”
The sound of Wyatt’s voice cutting through the silence of the dark hotel room immediately snaps me out of my sleep, which is already fitful, thanks to him.
“Don’t do that, Ky,” he continues.
It takes a moment, which I spend with my eyes squeezed together, to realize that he’s talking to me. And it takes another few seconds to grasp that at some point since I drifted off to sleep, he closed the tiny amount of space that had been left between our bodies earlier. He’s wrapped his arm loosely around my waist and thrown one of his long legs over mine, trapping me partially beneath him. He’s also gotten rid of his boxers.
Once some of my grogginess disappears, I realize that his very bare and—as much as I hate to admit it—incredibly epic cock is pressed against my stomach.
“Fuck is right,” I mutter under my breath, echoing the very word he used to wake me up.
“Kylie,” he says my name again, this time in an urgent growl.
His hold on my waist tightens, and I flinch. I just know he’ll mention how hot my skin feels, how he knows that every inch of my body is reacting to him right now.
But he doesn’t say anything. And that’s so untypical of Wyatt that I freeze. “Hmm?” When he doesn’t rush to answer me, I drag open my eyes. “Wyatt, what the—” My words catch in the back of my throat.
He’s asleep.
Wyatt is asleep, and he’s saying my name desperately, hopelessly.
Call it cliché, but when the man I’ve loved since I lost my virginity to him at seventeen, the heavy sleeper that I’m just a few days away from leaving for good, calls out my name in his sleep, I’ve got no choice but to react.
The question is: What am I supposed to do?
Blowing a short blue strand of hair up and out of my eye, I curl my fingers around his shoulders. “You okay?” I nudge him back and forth.
He grinds his hips down and doesn’t stop moving until his erection finds the outside of my panties. My lips part slowly, and something that sounds like a rumble mixed with a moan comes out of my mouth. What the hell is this man trying to do to me?
“Wyatt, are you okay?” I repeat.
He exhales roughly. “I’m fine.” He takes his hand away from my waist and moves it to my wrist, pulling my hand away from his shoulder. “I’m fine, but sleeping with you like this fucks me up.” He grazes the tip of his tongue over my fingers and then sucks every other one completely into his mouth, skimming his straight teeth over the ridges of my knuckles.
Even though I know where this is going, I still gasp when he presses my palm to his erection. “Not fucking fair, McCrae,” I say through a forced smile.
He closes my fingers one by one around his cock and then guides my hand up and down his shaft. No, this isn’t fair at all.
“Go back to sleep,” I tell him.
He finally decides to open his eyes, parting them lazily so that he can stare at me unblinking. The back of my throat constricts, and inadvertently, I tighten my grip on him.
The side of his mouth with the labret pulls up into a wicked grin. “We’ve slept long enough, Kylie,” he says. In a couple of swift, well-executed motions, he pins me flat on my back and rolls over on top of me, his knees sinking into the mattress on each side of my hips. “Now, I’m planning to fuck you until my wake-up call.”