CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Serena felt more than a little overwhelmed by everything that had happened in twenty-four short hours. Spending her first night in Sean’s bed. Having a huge fight over his mother’s pictures.

And now, hearing that he’d fallen in love with her.

She might have stood there all night, speechless and stunned, but fortunately, Sean knew exactly what to do, and the next thing she knew she was lying beneath him on his bed, her arms around his neck while he traced her lips with gentle—and very arousing—fingertips.

“Did I just move too fast after all my promises not to?”

She wanted to shake her head, wanted to tell him no, but she couldn’t lie to him. Not now. Not ever.

“I want,” she said, her words seeming to come from somewhere far away, “so badly to believe that it’s true, that someone like you could love me.”

“How could you doubt it for a second?”

“You know how people have said my whole life that I was beautiful?” God, she hated the way this was going to sound, but she just couldn’t hold back. Not anymore. Not with Sean. “That word. Love. Whenever I heard it, whoever said it to me, it felt the same. Like it didn’t really mean anything. Because they weren’t saying it about the real me.”

“But what if they were? What if everyone who ever said they loved you meant it?”

“How could they? How could any of them have ever meant it when no one but you has ever really known the real me?”

“I’ll tell you why,” he said in a deep voice that rumbled all the way through her. “Your beauty is so much deeper than the makeup, the outfits you wore, the part you played all those years. And your heart is so big, and so damned pure, that anyone would have to be blind not to see it. Not to see you and fall in love with you the way I did from the very start, from that very first night when you looked at me and saw everything.”

“I think,” she said in a voice that was barely above a whisper, “that I’ve fallen in love with you, too.”

He didn’t freak out the way she had when he’d said it to her. No, he simply smiled, a smile that got bigger and bigger by the second. “I thought you might have.”

His gentle teasing made it easier for her to relax into the idea of loving...and being loved. “What tipped you off?”

He stroked her hair back from her face and looked at her in a way he never had before. A look so warm, so comforting, so sweet and yet so raw and real that it shot straight to the center of her heart. “Where should I start?”

She loved the slightly cocky edge to his words, the fact that they could laugh and love each other at the same time. She’d never known it could be like this, that passion and desire and deep emotions could be tempered so perfectly with such ease, and with friendship.

The truest friendship she’d ever known.

“Start right here, with this,” she said, and then she kissed him, slowly running her tongue along his lower lip, from one corner of his mouth to the other. He was so delicious that one taste wasn’t nearly enough, so she took another, this time of his upper lip, and then of his tongue as she slipped hers inside his mouth.

They were both still fully clothed, but she was already wrapped all around him, and his hands were holding her hips tightly. She rocked into him, and knowing exactly how good it felt to come apart against him made her feel reckless. Bold.

Her whole life she’d had to hold back, had to make sure that she didn’t make a single misstep in front of the camera, but with Sean she didn’t need to worry. All he’d tried to do since that day he’d found her in the library so that he could show her the pictures of the two of them online, was love her. And even though she’d been scared to let him, how could she ever possibly have resisted him? Especially when his mother had done such an exceptional job of raising her son.

“You made me feel so good this morning,” she told him. “I want to make you feel good, too.”

His eyes were dilated nearly to black when he looked down at her. “You already are.”

He kissed her again and she almost forgot everything in the wonder of his mouth against hers. Only, in the past ten hours since he’d dropped her off at her dorm room, Serena had realized that she wanted to experience his pleasure as much as she did her own. It had been a revelation to come with his hands on her. And it would, she was certain, be even more of a revelation to make him come.

“Let me touch you, Sean.” When she ran her hands down from his broad shoulders to his jeans, she could feel the hard flexing of every muscle in his back, his hips, as he worked to keep himself under control. Slowly, she slid her fingers around to the front of his jeans. “Please.”

“Jesus.” He inhaled a long breath, then blew it out. She’d heard from Abi that he was a master of control, both around the bag at first and in the batting box. Though she hadn’t had a chance to see any of his games, she knew she was witnessing that control firsthand. “Okay,” he finally said, “but only if you’re naked first.”

It was a bargain she was happy to make, especially when she knew just how good he made every inch of her nakedness feel.

“Take off your clothes, Serena.”

He’d always stripped her bare before now, and surprise at his sudden request had her hesitating for a split second. Because oh my God it was sexy when he gave her a sensual command. To buy herself time to try to get her bearings back, at least a little bit, she said, “What do you want me to take off first?”

His slow smile held as much heat as happiness. “How about we go from the bottom up this time?”

Maybe the thought of being naked from the waist down while still covered up on top shouldn’t have been so wickedly, crazily sexy...but it was. So insanely sexy.

The first thing she did was toe off her tennis shoes, but she needed to sit up and bend over to reach her socks. And even with all of her clothes on, the way Sean looked at her while she slid the cotton from her feet was so freaking hot that she practically came right then and there.

She’d only just dropped her socks onto the floor beside his bed when he took one of her bare feet into his hands and ran his thumb up her arch with the perfect pressure to make her moan from the pleasure of the impromptu massage. By the time he did the same to her other foot, she was shocked to realize that every single way he touched her only aroused her more.