His Naughty Lessons
Chapter 121: Get Lucky

Chapter 121: Get Lucky

** Harper **

Caught off guard, Harper froze. Damn, this stubborn idiot wasn’t going to back out at a time like this, right? Right??

He looked guilty as she pulled away and looked into his eyes questioningly. "I ..." He cleared his throat. "I didn’t bring a condom for this trip."

"..."

"..."

Harper was speechless for at least a full minute. She really had no idea what to say. This guy had just spent forever trying to convince her that he was a bad boy. What kind of bad boy would say something like that with a girl right on top of him? And what kind of bad boy didn’t have a condom with him at all times in the first place?

Unless ...

Eli cursed under his breath at the dubious stare she gave him. "It’s not like I expected to get lucky!" he argued, clearly more than a little embarrassed. "Hell, I wasn’t even expecting to talk to you outside mandatory meetings we happen to share. What would I need one of those things for?"

Blunt as his words were, Harper’s heart fluttered when she realized that he was equating "getting lucky" to "getting lucky with her". Despite all his warnings that she shouldn’t trust him for commitment, he was already starting to prove himself otherwise.

She chuckled at the thought. Before he could stare back at her and feel mortified that she was finding joy in his misery, she pushed him back lightly so that he was leaning against the pillows piling high on the sofa. Shrugging the throw blanket off of her shoulders, she climbed over him, straddling his waist.

"Well, fortunately there is more than one way to get lucky, isn’t there?" she whispered as she planted a soft kiss on the side of his neck, just beneath his ear.

His whole body stiffened. Then, as if something snapped loose inside him, one of his hands darted up, gripping her hip with a barely controlled fierceness that scorched her through her skin.

"Harper." His voice was a breathy husk, yet the word he uttered was soft, careful like a reverent prayer.

That was all the signal Harper needed to continue. She kissed him again, this time at the end of his jawline where it met his neck. Trailing her lips down that sensitive area, she followed it up with a path of feathery pecks, bare brushes of her mouth against his heated skin.

His eyes fluttered closed as a sigh threaded out of him, and he tilted his head to the other side, giving her better access.

The thrumming of her heart quickened at his reaction. She had never kissed him this way before — soft and slow, allowing herself all the time to explore him and savor him — and it wasn’t only because they tended to go straight into action during their "lessons". To her, these lingering caresses felt too intimate, even more so than sex itself, and she simply had never had the opportunity to do it ... Until now.

Now, she could finally relish every sensation of it to her heart’s content. She could finally show him all the intimacy she craved from him and for him, because in this moment, he was hers.

Keeping her kisses slow and light, she continued to draw a soft line along the side of his neck, pausing at every spot that made his breath catch and brushing her lips again there. She took her time, traveling inch by inch toward his collarbones, and when she reached them, she traced back to the bottom of his throat, flicking her tongue against its deep hollow.

A gasp escaped him. "You’ve ... never done this before," he rasped.

Oh, he would soon experience plenty that she hadn’t done before. Harper let out a soft chuckle. "No ... There are things I’ve always wanted to do to you too, you know."

His grip tightened on her hip. From the corner of her eye, she saw him visibly twitch inside his boxers.

Smiling to herself, she kept going, trailing more kisses past the solid lines of his chest and the hard contours of his stomach. She had done this part before with her hands, mapping every ridge and hollow of his body with her touch, yet it felt different now with her lips measuring the same landscape. The musky scent of his skin filled her nostrils, mixed with a subtle hint of chlorine, and she breathed it in deeply, intoxicated by the familiar, heady aroma.

She could do this forever, she thought. Study him with her hands and lips and tongue, lost in the feel of him encompassing all her senses. Revel in all those stuttered breaths she drew out of him as she went, in the way those sculpted muscles tighten the moment her kisses landed on them, as if scorched by fire.

And she would do it forever ... if not for the next sigh leaping out of his throat as she reached the area just beneath his navel. The sound was so low that it was almost a groan, sending a pulse of shivering echoes coursing through her own body. His hand slid away from her hip, up her shoulder into her hair, and she could feel the tension stretching taut in him as his fingers kneaded her scalp, waves of heat rippling through the touch.

She looked up at him. Feeling the shift of her motion, he opened his eyes, and their gazes met. Those crystalline blue eyes were dark, like they always were every time he looked at her during those Saturday evening adventures. But this time, there was something more in their depths. Something tender and soft ... beautiful yet fragile, like the ethereal gleam of sunlight on a butterfly’s wing.

Harper wondered if the look in her own eyes was the same. Tender warmth and blazing heat flooded through her veins at the same time as she held that wordless gaze, and she hooked her fingers over the elastic of his boxers, pulling them free.