“Wait,” he said, sliding his thumb over her wet nipple. “I’m not done.”

“Please,” she said. “I have to see you. I have to touch you.”

“You weren’t the one dying to do this for years.”

“Because I didn’t know,” she said, helplessness in her voice. “I didn’t know.”

He leaned back in the seat, and she pushed his shirt up, tugging it over his head. Her breath hissed through her teeth as she moved her palms over his body.

“You’re so sexy,” she said. “And it was killing me tonight. Talking to you and knowing that. That guy who was trying to pick me up was like an indistinct blur. I couldn’t even really see him. I just kept thinking about you.”

That level of intensity coming from Sammy was something else. And he hadn’t thought that his arousal could get turned up another notch. He didn’t think it was possible. But that did it. Oh hell, that did it.

He pushed one hand between her thighs and shoved her panties to one side, stroking her while she continued to explore his body with her fingertips. She whimpered, moving her hips back and forth in time with his strokes. Then with fumbling fingers she undid his belt, his jeans, and he lifted his hips so that she could pull them down partway, expose him. Delicate fingers wrapped around his length, and she squeezed him.

Even in the dim moonlight, he watched her face. Made sure to look down where her hand met his aching flesh. Because it was Sammy touching him like that. Sammy with her hand on his body this way. He was ready to shift, ready to plunge inside her body when he remembered. He cursed, then struggled for his wallet, which Sammy took out of his fingers. She went pawing through it, digging until she produced a condom. She tore it open.

She made a slightly regretful expression as she rolled it onto his body. “I need you inside me,” she said. “And this is the right way to do it. But I have to say... I liked having you with nothing between us.”

“I just need to have you,” he said, but her words burned through his blood. Because there wasn’t a hell of a lot that was sexier than a woman saying she wanted you with no barrier.

Well. Sammy wanting him at all was damn sexy. Barrier or no.

Sammy.

Her name was like a banner stretched across the whole of his mind as he positioned himself at the entrance to her body and flexed his hips as she sank down onto him.

Her fingertips digging into his skin as he filled her.

“Ryder,” she whispered, his name on her lips as the tight, wet heat of her surrounded him, the most erotic and heady experience he’d ever had in his life.

Yeah, this was why he’d let her run away. Because he couldn’t breathe through this, much less think. Because she was too beautiful for him to see past. Because the scent of her, the feel of her, filled his senses entirely, and he didn’t know what that meant for him. What it meant for them. Because he wanted her. And he was having her, and still wanted her, so he had no idea what that meant for his sanity. For the whole rest of his life.