I don’t want him to leave, and the thought of me leaving with him—it excites and terrifies me at the same time. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for a life on the run, and more importantly, I’m not ready to give up on my dreams that have already been put on hold. I’ll have to return to New York at some point—with or without Ace.
I refuse to be that girl who gets so swept up in a man that she tosses everything aside for him, losing her dreams and identity. That’s not me.
Ace stirs below me, and I know he’s in the process of waking.
I place a soft kiss on his lips as our naked bodies remain pressed together. “Good morning. Hungry?”
“Starving,” he whispers and pulls my face back up to his, letting me know that he’s not just talking about food here.
He shifts and pulls me on top of him, where he cups my ass as he deepens our kiss.
This man is insatiable.
I bring my legs down around his hips and press my knees into the mattress below us, careful to keep his stiff cock outside of my body.
He moans when I rotate my hips a couple times, sliding him against my slick folds and enjoying the feel of his skin against my most sensitive body part.
“God . . . Iris,” he growls.
I love when I make the normally collected Ace go a little caveman. It seems that I have this ability to make him lose his control . . . and I like that . . . a lot.
The calluses from playing the guitar make his hands a little rough, but I love the way they feel sliding up the bare skin of my back when he’s enjoying my body.
The friction of the tip of him hitting my clit over and over causes me to moan this time and then whisper, “I need you.”
He turns to my nightstand and grabs the box of condoms. A frown immediately etches into his perfect features, and I stop writhing against him, sitting up. “Are we out?”
Ace’s lips pull into a tight line. “Yeah. We went through that box really fast. I planned on getting more today because I knew we were getting low.”
I sigh, deflated, but still completely turned on, and I know he is as well because his hard length is still pressing into me. “I’m on birth control . . . and we are exclusive . . . right?”
I allow my thought to trail off, not wanting to seem so forward with my request.
Ace traces my lips with his long fingers. “Are you sure . . . ? We don’t have to. I can wait.”
I kiss his fingers and nod. “I’m yours, right? And you’re mine?”
“Irrevocably, on both accounts,” he answers. “But I want you to be sure. I don’t want you to make a rash decision because you’re horny.”
I smile down at him. “If we belong to one another, I don’t see how this would be a rash decision.”
He’s quiet for a beat, and knowing now how intelligent Ace is, I’m sure he’s contemplating every scenario before giving in to me. “You’re right, but I want you to know that I’ve never done this before. You’ll be my first. Have you . . . ?”
I shake my head. “Never. I always made Tanner use protection. I guess I never trusted him.” I peer into his eyes as a revelation occurs to me. “But I trust you, implicitly.”
Ace licks his lips like he’s suddenly nervous. “So you’ve only ever been with Tanner?”
“Yes,” I answer honestly, and my face reddens at the admission that I’ve only ever been with one man in my twenty-two years.
But that’s got me curious, and I can’t help myself from asking the question that nags at every woman when she thinks about her man and his sexual history. “How many people have you been with?”
His eyes drift away from my face, and my heart drops, knowing more than likely that means it’s going to be a number that I don’t want to hear from a man whose unprotected penis I’m about to let inside me.
“Ace . . . ?” Even I can hear the worry in my voice while I await his answer.
His gaze flicks back to mine. “It’s hopefully not as bad as you’re thinking, but it’s a number that I’m not proud of . . . it’s a number that happened before I made a commitment to myself that I was worth loving and that someday I would find a woman who loved me.”
I swallow hard. “Do I really want to know? Is it that bad?”
He shrugs. “The feeling that emulated love was something I was addicted to for a while. I found it easily in the arms of random women who wanted to use me for sex. Psychologists would probably say I used women to fill the void I felt when my mother gave me away. And in a weird way, I’m sure that’s partly true, but I know that I was smart enough to figure out that that wasn’t love I was feeling. It was a way to temporarily forget that I was once unloved and so easily discarded. So, once I figured that out in my early twenties, after attending a few psych classes, I stopped randomly fooling around.”
I furrow my brow. “So before me . . . ?”
“I haven’t had sex in a while,” he admits. “Sure, there were times I slipped back into my old ways, but for the most part I’ve been pretty good at abstaining.”
My mouth drops open. I’m completely floored by this news, and honestly, I can’t wrap my head around it. “You mean you don’t sleep with random groupies on a daily basis?”
Ace shakes his head. “No. Not even close.”
“Wow . . . I thought all rock stars slept with their groupies every chance they got.”