Finally I was too tired to just stare at the side of his sleeping face or wonder at all the little nicks and tiny marks that dotted his skin. This close to him the scar above his eyebrow was really wicked-looking. It hooked from the arch up into his hairline and spidered off to web across his temple. It looked like he was a very lucky man to still have a functioning eyeball on that side of his handsome face. There was history there, a life lived hard and dangerously mapped out across his skin for the entire world to see and judge. It made Rome an even more difficult man for me to try and figure out, and frankly I was exhausted by all of it. My last thought before I gave up the fight of trying to wait him out was that not once in all the years Jimmy and I had shared a bed had he ever held me this close, like he never wanted me to go.

I wasn’t sure what had me stirring awake—if it was the sun coming in the blinds, if it was the feeling of being covered by an electric blanket in the middle of summer, or if it was the impossible-to-ignore fact that I wasn’t in my frilly pink bed alone. I squinted against the morning light coming in the room, but all I could see for days and days was blue. A blue that no words could describe, a blue that was so hot and bright I felt like it could burn me alive from the inside out. I opened my mouth to ask Rome if he was feeling all right, to tell him to get the hell off of me, but nothing came out. We just stared at each other and the lack of clothing between us suddenly became a noticeable thing. I could feel his heart thundering against my own where our chests were pressed together, could feel his sides rise and fall as he sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, could feel the hardness of an erection that needed its own zip code press against the softness between my legs, not protected at all by my tiny sleep shorts. This was a compromising situation to be in any way you looked at it, and considering we were practically strangers, my normally nimble tongue was having a hard time finding its defenses.

His hand that was holding on to my butt gave the cheek a squeeze and I thought he was going to lever himself up and off of me, but he didn’t. He used the other hand to hold his considerable bulk up off of me for the first time in hours and his free hand lifted and I went frozen still as he used it to oh so gently trace the curve of my bottom lip where my mouth was still hanging open like a dimwit. Hands that big, that rough, shouldn’t be capable of being so reverent, so delicate. It made me gasp.

I should say something. He should say something. Neither of us did, though, and when those pretty, sad eyes moved closer to mine, when that mouth surrounded by a sexy shadow of scruff dropped to cover mine, all I could do was lie there and take it like it was inevitable. I had been kissed plenty in my lifetime—by good boys and bad boys, by boys I liked and boys I didn’t, by boys I spent just a minute with and boys I had spent years with, but no one had ever kissed me like this. Something happened when that firm mouth settled over mine. My brain short-circuited, my common sense and basic rationality took a hike, and all I was left with was a bundle of raging hormones and a desire so sharp and pointed it almost hurt when it started to pulse under my skin.

I was surrounded by him, engulfed by him. He was just everywhere and it was overwhelming. I knew I should tell him to stop, that this wasn’t right. I didn’t do this kind of thing and I had a feeling he was still cut open and bleeding from whatever had sent him over the edge last night, but the words just wouldn’t come and it wasn’t like I could have used them if they did. His mouth was hard on mine, his tongue invading every corner, every hidden place I had in my mouth. Neither one of us had very much hair to hold on to, so I had to settle for grabbing on to his ears to keep him in place. I should be pushing him away, not pulling him closer, but there was no way that was going to happen, not with all that brawn pushing against me and those eyes making me drown in them.

I kissed him back, because really that was all I could do. I slid my tongue against his, let my teeth find the soft inner side of his lip, wrapped an arm around his neck, and we devoured each other. There was no other way to describe it. We writhed together, the rough denim of his jeans rubbing against my bare legs, his hands holding me in a grip that I couldn’t break free from if I wanted to. We kissed, we sucked, we bit, and somewhere along the line it went from some kind of spontaneous combustion to a slow burn that had me wrapping a leg around his lean waist and not protesting when impatient hands started pulling at the T-shirt I went to bed in.

This was too fast, it was too wrong. He was not the kind of guy I had been holding out for. He was as far from my idea of perfect as could be, but there was no arguing that he fit the bill for building me up to something tingling and achy in no time flat. I gasped a little when the fabric cleared my head. I hadn’t been n*ked with a guy in a really long time, and getting n*ked with this guy was all kinds of intimidating. Where he was all smooth skin and perfectly cut muscles, I was all swirly colors inked on skin that had a tendency to tan but was also dusted in freckles. Besides my left arm, I had a riot of lilies inked along my rib cage on the left side. They were bright, full of every color under the sun, and the stamen on each of them was decorated with a transdermal piercing. I had four or five little rhinestones that twinkled and winked from the center of each flower. It was something I was sure this serious and intense soldier had never seen before, but it didn’t slow him down. He tossed my shirt over his shoulder and touched the tip of his index finger to one, which made me shiver. We still hadn’t exchanged a single word and things were quickly moving out of hand. I was running out of room to make a graceful escape.

I put a hand on the center of his chest, spread my fingers wide, and tried to marshal my wayward and heady thoughts. I needed a minute to catch my breath, a second to remember we were not two people who had things in common, who would not normally exist in each other’s world. He didn’t give it to me. He was rubbing his thumb between the little jewels dotting my side. He didn’t seem weirded out by it or unnerved by it or all the ink that was now on display, in fact not once had he pulled that hypnotic blue gaze away from my own. He put his huge hand over mine so that it forced my palm flat against his skin. I didn’t like to be bossed around by anyone, at any time, but something was happening to me, to us, and I just couldn’t seem to stop it. He dragged my hand over his breastbone, across that corrugated and taut plane of his stomach, over his belly button, and down that light happy trail, stopping when he reached the stiff material of his fly, the heat and hardness of his skin behind it burning instantly through the fabric into my fingers. He didn’t press me any further. He removed his hand and lifted it to brush his thumb over my cheek. He was giving me an out if I wanted it; somehow without one syllable this guy said more to me than any other guy I could ever remember going to bed with.

It was right there hovering on the periphery—sanity, logic, rationality; all the things I needed to grab on to in order to stop this. They were hazy and foggy, but they were there and Rome was giving me a chance to grab on to them if that was what I wanted to do, and all at once I realized the refrain about him being a good guy at heart had to be true. He wasn’t pushing, he wasn’t trying to take advantage even though he was so much bigger than me and could obviously force his hand if so inclined. He was making it my call and I was about to surprise us both because I couldn’t resist the allure of all that rock-hard skin throbbing under my fingertips. I wanted to see it, wanted to touch it, wanted to see if it was as big and hard as the rest of him. I hooked just the tips of my fingers in the top of his jeans and popped the button out of the hole.

He hissed a breath out between clenched teeth and dropped his head so that he could get his mouth around the tip of one of my br**sts. It was so startling, the suction, and the moisture, the rough scrape of his morning beard across my skin, that I arched up and threw my head back. I wasn’t overly endowed, my br**sts were like the rest of me, on the small side and delicate, but they were supersensitive. When he ran his tongue over the quivering peak, when he scraped the pebbled flesh with the sharp edge of his teeth, I was done. There was no more thought to try and act right, no more worry that I didn’t even know him that well, I just wanted and needed and he was going to give it to me. End of story.

I shoved both of my hands between us, got his zipper down without wounding him, and started pulling the denim off over his hips. No underwear, that was always hot, and he wasn’t shy because he levered up and shoved the pants the rest of the way off. They fell on the floor next to my discarded shirt, and while he crawled back up over me I took a second to check out the goods and felt my eyes widen in alarm. I wasn’t a prude, I knew dudes’ business came in all shapes and sizes, I was intimately familiar with the good, bad, and the ugly. It was a hazard of my profession, but Rome was packing something that I wasn’t sure anatomy and biology were going to let happen. Needless to say, he was huge, everywhere, and I was small, everywhere. I was thinking I needed to rethink this entire thing and start acting like the smart, responsible person I was, but he got his hands on my shorts and my panties and I was n*ked and splayed under him before the protest and panic could find footing. There was no way we were going to fit, even if I was so turned on I felt like everywhere our skin touched we were going to end up welded together. I could feel desire and liquid want pooling between my legs, saw that he felt it, too, when his eyes flashed cobalt sparks in every direction. I didn’t care how sexy he was, how unholy hot and bothered he had me, there was no way that weapon of mass destruction was going to work its way inside my body.

My apprehension must have been displayed on my face, because the eyebrow under the scar danced up and he finally stopped touching me, stopped dropping sucking little kisses along my collarbone, and stopped running featherlight fingertips over the flowers decorating my side. He stared down at me and I was fascinated by a drop of sweat that started at his temple and crested over his cheek, wound its way down his neck, and tracked over a pec muscle that looked like it belonged on a marble statue. I wasn’t familiar with this kind of restraint, this kind of will, so I just traced the track that little drop of moisture had trailed and stopped at his nipple.

“That’s never going to fit.”

The words were strangled, like I hadn’t had anything to drink in a hundred years or more. We were so close, this was so raw and open I didn’t know what to do with him, or with me. My words were meant to be funny, to slow things down, but I sounded scared, even to my own ears, and I knew it wasn’t just because he was far more than any man I had ever been with, or maybe it was.

That single dark eyebrow danced even higher and that little half grin that undid me the other day flashed across his face. I guess he decided that my words were a challenge and not a warning because the next thing I knew, all his attention switched to that already damp and needy place between my legs. He pressed my legs open with one of his thighs, pulled my h*ps up, and delved his fingers into folds that were achy and electrified by his touch. He was about to find another surprise that guys only got to see, got to touch, when I took my clothes off, and I felt it the instant his questing fingers made contact with the small little hoop hidden down there.

Once he touched it, he stilled, just a fraction. I had had the hood piercing for as long as I could remember. Initially I got it because I thought it was edgy and cool; now that I was older I kept it because I had had enough sex with enough guys that needed a damn bull’s-eye to get to the good stuff. Rome wasn’t one of those, he also wasn’t scared or put off by it. He gave the ring a little tug that had my eyes rolling back into my head and made me pant out his name. Seeing the results, he played with the slippery metal while playing with the rest of me, creating a tidal wave of sensation that was going to make me break at any second. He touched, me, stroked me, rubbed his thumb steadily and unrelenting over the hoop and the tight little bud underneath it. He worked me over like it had never been done before, and just as I was grinding into him, pressing my heels into the mattress of the bed, splitting in half and seeing stars, he removed those skilled fingers, shifted me under him, and pushed all that turgid, straining flesh inside of me. I wasn’t ready for it, but he slid in up to the hilt and filled me up to the point I thought I was going to suffocate on all I was feeling, all I could see was blazing out of his bright eyes.