“Is that a yes? I need to hear it.”

She pressed a kiss on his lips and pulled back. “Yes.” Another kiss. “Yes.” One more kiss. “Yes to everything.”

He turned with her in his arms and started walking toward the tasting table.

Kamilah huffed out a breath and trembled in relief. Goose bumps pebbled her arms, but not with fear of the storm. With anticipation. With need. She unwound her arms from his neck and reached down to the edge of her tank top. His voice stopped her.

“No,” he bit out. “I do that. Not you.”

“But—”

He nipped her earlobe and then gave it a suck. “I have been waiting to undress you for fifteen years.”

The warmth in her belly and other places threatened to ignite into a raging inferno. She gulped and nodded at him.

His eyes blazed. “I plan to enjoy the f*** out of it, and not even you are going to take that pleasure from me.” He suddenly let her go.

She landed on the table with a smack of her bare thighs against the cold metal. Before she could adjust, he was there between her legs.

His mouth was on hers, and his hands were everywhere else. His palms slid up the inside of her top along her stomach and over her chest.

She took that as her invite to do the same to him. His skin was so soft. Everything about him was familiar, yet alien at the same time.

He groaned and pulled back after a minute. He grabbed the bottom of her shirt and ripped it over her head. He attacked the front zipper of her sports bra. He made a sound of frustration when he saw the clasp that held the inner cups together. Then it was opened, and her bra was tossed away somewhere with her shirt. He stared down at her and let out a breath. “Sh**,” he whispered. He bent his head and put his mouth on her while his hands went to the button and zipper of her shorts.

“Hurry up,” she ordered, using her hands to lift herself off the table.

He grabbed her shorts and panties and pulled them both down at the same time. He got them over one boot, but they got caught on the other. They both left them there. He put a hand in the middle of her chest and pushed her back.

She shivered from the cold metal against her back and from anticipation. She looked up at him.

Still fully dressed, he stood between her thighs as he took in every inch of her from the top of her head to where her knees bent at the edge of the table. “F*** You’re better than I ever imagined. My dreams don’t even come close.”

Kamilah felt her body flush. “You can’t even see anything,” she said. “It’s almost pitch-black in here.” Of course, that was the exact moment lightning flashed and illuminated the entire distillery.

He licked his bottom lip, and then his mouth curled in one corner. “I can see enough.”

“Liam,” she begged. She didn’t know if she was begging him to spare her embarrassment or get on with it.

He leaned over her, put both hands on the table by her shoulders, and then kissed her deeply.

She wrapped her limbs around him to hold him close, but it didn’t last long.

He broke her hold and started making his way from her mouth to her neck, from her neck to her breasts, and after spending some time there, he dragged his mouth lower, over her stomach, to her hips, to her thighs, and then between.

Finally.

At that point she wasn’t sure what she was saying. She didn’t know if she was speaking in English, Spanish, or some mix of the two. She didn’t even know if she was saying words. She could’ve very well just been communicating via moans, grunts, and breathy sighs as she stared at the ceiling and grabbed pointlessly at the table beneath her. All she was aware of was Liam’s hands and mouth. That was it. Nothing else in the world existed at the moment but him. He was the beginning and end of her consciousness.

His tongue hit a particularly good spot, and she cried out. She looked down and wished she could see more than a dark head and a large pale hand on her stomach. She wanted to see his face. She wanted to look into his eyes. She wanted that connection with him.

As if it had heard her vehement wishes, lightning flared again brighter and longer than before, right when Liam happened to look up at her. His blue eyes flashed white-hot like the lightning. He sucked one more time, hard.

Kamilah was propelled out of her body into the surrounding storm. It beat at her from all sides like it had years ago, but unlike then, she wasn’t scared. There was too much heat, too much pleasure, for her to be scared. She simply let it take her, twisting and catapulting her through the electric sky.

Through it all, Liam was there with her, urging her higher and deeper into the storm.

After some time she came back down into herself. She should’ve been exhausted, satisfied, by her trip, but she wasn’t. It was as if the electricity from the storm was inside her now, demanding a conduit to escape. She sat up quickly, grabbed Liam by the face with both hands, and pulled his mouth to hers in a kiss made of pure static and currents. “I need you,” she said between kisses. “Inside me.” More kisses. Rougher and wetter. “Now.”

He groaned, and she felt it deep in his chest where it was pressed against her own. His fist came down on the table and the vibration reverberated up her body. “I don’t have condoms.”

“What?” she panted. Her brain still wasn’t working right.

“I haven’t needed them.” His tone was a touch defensive, but more frustrated than anything.

“I have some,” Kamilah informed him. “They are upstairs in the drawer of the nightstand on my side.”

He shot her a look of surprise.

“What, you don’t think I can have casual sex sometimes?” She didn’t tell him that she’d bought them less than a month ago in a moment of horny hope.

He straightened, his face blank. “Is that what this is for you, casual sex?”

Kamilah’s head jerked back. “F***, no. There’s nothing casual about this.” She was having a difficult time with the thought that this was Liam, the same Liam who’d once hidden her in one of his father’s empty whiskey barrels in an attempt to get her parents to forget her at his house so she could sleep over. Then again, he wasn’t that Liam at all. He was completely different in body and in temperament. This Liam was large and hard and dark. The only people he showed his soft underbelly to were his grandfather and her. Some primal part of her loved that, loved that she got a piece of him that no one else did. She leaned in and put her mouth to his neck like she did when they slept—the other time he showed vulnerability with her.

“Damn right there’s not.” He turned his head and gave her a hard kiss. “This is not casual.” A sucking kiss on her neck. “This is years’ worth of anticipation, expectation, desire.” He worked his way down to her nipple.

She nodded. It was all of that and more. It was two magnets finally getting close enough to snap together. It was the last two pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle finally clicking into place. It was two hearts beating in time, finally.

romance novel a proposal they can't refuse natalie caña

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