mean to push you.”
“Um, in case you couldn’t tell, I was just as carried away and pushing right back.”
Andrew smiled tenderly. “I swear this isn’t why I brought you up here. This was supposed to be a perfectly innocent tour of your rooms.”
“When did you plan for us to uh. . .” Andrew’s nearness, especially with his hand caressing the small of my back, made me unable to come up with anything except one word ─ fuck . But I didn’t want to appear crude in front of the future father of my child.
He nodded, as if he understood my problem and couldn’t come up with a more elegant, classier way to say fuck either. “I didn’t want to push you or rush things. The last thing I wanted was for you to feel coerced or pressured.”
I caressed his cheek and traced the outline of his square jaw with my fingertip. “Does it look like I feel coerced or pressured?”
“What you feel is amazing.” He pulled the bottom of my shirt out of my jeans and gently massaged my lower back. “So soft, like silk.”
The touch of his skin on mine made my heart race. While I wanted nothing more to feel his hands all over my body, it occurred to me that we were doing this in broad daylight.
I’d only had sex with one other guy, a fellow chemical engineering student. We’d only done it twice, and both times had been very disappointing. I hadn’t gotten wet then, like now with Andrew. And Karl’s dick felt nowhere near as big or as hard as Andrew’s, who hadn’t even taken off his pants yet.
Karl and I had sex under the protective cloak of darkness. That way, he couldn’t see the slight pouch of my belly ─ too many candy bars from the vending machine while waiting on lab results ─ or my three inch appendectomy scar. At the rate Andrew and I were going, he would see all of this and more.
I dropped my hands to my sides and he did the same. “Too fast?” he asked.
“No, I like what we’re doing as well as the pace we’re going. A lot.”
Andrew grinned and wrapped his arms around my waist. “So why did we stop?”
“Um, you think we can pull the curtains? Make it a little darker in here?” I didn’t think closing the drapes would make the room totally dark. However, they looked heavy enough to dim the lighting so that my physical flaws weren’t quite so obvious.
“Honey, I assure you, no one can see us, even with the curtains pulled back. I had a special tinting put on the windows so that no one can see inside even though you can still see outside.”
Peeping Toms didn’t scare me nearly as much as Andrew’s turning away from me in disgust. “Can we just close them anyway? I’d feel better if it wasn’t so bright in here.”
Awareness sparked in his eyes. He gripped my waist tighter and buried his lips in my hair. “I want to see you, Ryanna. All of you.”
“And if you don’t like what you see?”
“I will,” he said, in a voice full of confidence that I didn’t feel. “Here, let me show you something.”
He began to unbutton his shirt and a wave of disappointment swept over me. I’d been looking forward to unwrapping that particular present myself. Oh, well, there were still his pants to consider.
Andrew dropped the shirt to the floor and took a step back, pointing to his lower torso. While he had an extremely impressive six-pack, his fingers directed my attention to a four inch scar. The puckered and twisted section of skin marred his otherwise his perfect stomach.
“I got mugged during my senior year of college,” he explained. “When I wouldn’t give up my wallet or my mountain bike, the punk stabbed me. Fortunately, some sorority girls were on their way back from a party and found me almost immediately after it happened. The doctors said it if wasn’t for them, I would have bled out for sure.”
Drawn to it almost like a magnet, I stepped forward and gently touched his stomach, tracing the coarse path of the healed wound. Andrew took a deep breath before he