Her lashes rose, and his incandescent green eyes trapped her, sucking her into their depths, spinning her within the whirlpool of her needs. His needs. He lowered his hand, scraped his knuckles across a breast that had become accessible when she shifted.

“Any time, every time you’d let me, I’d latch on to this little peak until you were writhing with pleasure, screaming ‘Zachary.’ ”

She shivered, got wetter, hotter, her rising temperature causing her to desperately press her breast into his hand. “I wanted you,” she whispered. I still want you.

The look he leveled on her blazed with heat. “You loved me, Paige.” The words buffeted her with a blow of searing pain, mingled with yearning and longing and regrets. That someone remembered what she couldn’t drove the sharpest, longest dagger into her chest.

Because she should remember this, too.

A choked noise darted out of her as his hand turned, engulfing her flesh. His fingers teased, tweaked, plucked the nipple, and his timbre dropped another notch. “We wanted to make love.”

She could picture the eighteen-year-old girl in the picture, a good girl, full of hesitation, and too easily conjured up the isolated, enigmatic new boy who’d been patient with her. “And?” she softly prodded.

In a startlingly easy move, he flipped her onto her back and slid down her length, easing her knees apart. “And I waited.”

Moisture pooled between her legs. He knew her. She knew him. Somehow it was as if she’d been born for those hands whisking up the inside of her knees, for his hands to trek across her skin.

God. What had she found here? What had she missed her whole life?

His palm stroked languorously up her left thigh. Deliciously callused, the hands of a man who used them. Paige had forgotten about her scars, but at his gentle handling, she burned bright red with embarrassment. “Please come back here.”

“Shh. Baby, shh.”

He nuzzled her stomach, both hands kneading her thighs. They weren’t lovely, her scars. Despite what he’d said. They were painful to see and had been painful to wear, but suddenly they knew his lips, and they became another part of her body. Another part he could kiss.

“Poor baby.” He kissed her scars from tip to tip, side to side, one at a time. “Poor baby.”

His hands slipped under her body and cradled her cheeks as he ducked his head. His nose nuzzled the tender fluff between her legs. Then he expertly parted her folds open with his thumbs. “Poor”—his tongue sampled—“wet”—he licked again—“baby.”

Pleasure jolted up her spine. “Zach!”

“I’d tasted only what had coated my fingers all those years ago, but this …” He made a pass across the swollen glistening lips and, eyes closing, repeated several passes until he stopped at her center, lapped, and melded his mouth with that part of her. “I could drink you up, Paige. I could live on you, eat and eat and eat your sweetness all day.”