“I’ll go anywhere,” she said, “as long as you go with me.”

He heard nothing but love in her voice, love and trust, which sounded about the same to him.

“You’ll tell me if you get scared?”

“I won’t get scared.”

“I know you won’t.” Of course she wouldn’t. Whether she’d done this before or not, Paulina wasn’t the type of woman to be scared by what she wanted, only scared of not getting it. So she had no reason to be afraid of anything because there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t give her if she asked for it.

He slid his whole hand under the fabric of her panties and started to pull them down. Paulina went still in his arms, like she’d taken in a breath but wasn’t ready to release it yet. Her eyes were closed, her thick dark lashes on her cheeks. Her face looked kissed by gold in the soft light of her bedside lamp. No make-up. Half-asleep. She’d never looked so sexy to him.

Cyrus was so hard it hurt and got harder as the palm of his hand cupped her soft round ass as he pulled her panties down and off of her. He’d patted her bottom of her clothes before, over her skirts and jeans and even her bikini bottoms, but there was nothing quite like his bare hand on her bare ass.

“Let’s elope tomorrow,” he said.

“Why wait?”

He laughed softly. Although they were alone in the house, they both were keeping their voices low, like what they were doing was a secret. And maybe it was, though who they were keeping the secret from, neither knew nor cared. It was just fun to have a secret to keep together.

Although it almost killed him to pull away from her warm soft body, he had to do it. He came up on his knees to finish taking her panties off, and threw them across the room out into the hall.

“You’re crazy,” she said, grinning. Despite the smile, he could tell she was nervous, at least a little. She’d clamped her legs tight together. He couldn’t even fit a credit card between those knees, much less his body. But they’d work on that.

“You make me crazy.” He rubbed his hands up and down her thighs again, the tops, the sides, the backs, trying to calm her, relax her. Her nightgown was long enough that it covered her. And though he was dying to see her, all of her, he wasn’t going to rush it. They’d waited almost two years to be together like this. They’d survive waiting another five minutes.

Maybe.

“You are the sexiest man alive,” Paulina said as she looked up at him.

“Damn.”

“It’s true.”

“I wasn’t arguing.”

She giggled and shook her head. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

Cyrus took his t-shirt off, threw it so it landed by her panties in the hall.

She looked up at him again. “Now I can believe it.”