Page 21 of Codename: Dustoff

CHAPTERELEVEN

We’d upgraded to kissing. I don’t know where in the arc of the two days spent in Barren Hill we’d graduated to this point, but I wasn’t going to question it. Emmett was a ten out of ten in the kissing department. I wanted more.

I basked in the pleasant warmth of the town. I made two new friends in Finn and Gemini, and enjoyed the sweetest Christmas tree lighting. I was high on life, and probably a little more relaxed than usual thanks to the Baileys in the hot chocolate. After the tree lighting and the singing, Emmett and I stole off into the resort to “warm up,” and “rest my leg.”

“Over here, by the fireplace,” Emmett suggested, directing me toward a settee tucked out of the way of the main thoroughfare nearest to the elevators and restaurants.

“C’mere,” he pulled me against him, as we collapsed onto the settee.

I couldn’t stop touching him. Feeling the ridges of his chest beneath his coat, the abrasive scratch of his five o’clock shadow, and the lush warmth of the pouty lips I couldn’t get enough of. Each kiss wound me tighter. Suddenly I wanted more. More tongue, harder kisses, I wanted to give as much as I took. And I needed to feel it all. To drown in the heady haze that spun me in a web of need.

“Amelia,” Emmett crooned, “We should stop but I can’t get my body to agree with my brain.”

I couldn’t get out of my jacket fast enough. While fully aware I was in a public place, I wanted to feel the heat of his hand closer to my actual skin. A single kiss morphed into two, which turned into a slide of tongue and a shift in positions.

Emmett’s hand was everywhere. Under my shirt, on my back, holding my neck in place while he plundered my mouth. I had no idea how I could feel completely consumed by him with only a single arm eliciting all of that sensation on my body.

“Just five more minutes,” I told him, between heady kisses. “They’re going to start looking for us soon.”

One minute, I joyfully pressed against Emmett, the pressure of the growing ridge in his jeans getting ever so closer to place that had long sat dormant and ignored. Seconds later, fire shot through my core. A pain so intense it stole my breath from me in the exact opposite to what had occurred with Emmett moments before. The sudden onslaught sucker punched me right in the solar plexus. It made it hard to think let alone form words. I didn’t even know where the agony centralized or why it tore through me with such ferocity. The shock and speed of its appearance yanked me into a flashback of the early days in Landstuhl. The days when anguish was the only feeling I knew, and my brain left me rudderless in an ocean of torment and confusion.