Tattoo (Take It Off #7)(16)
Author: Cambria Hebert

His teeth flashed white when he pulled back. “When a guy spends eighty percent of his time making out with a girl in a corner, no one ever thinks he’s listening to their conversation.”

Eighty percent of his time? “Holy crap, that’s a lot of girls.”

He sat back, abandoning his first aid efforts. “I find it interesting that I just told you my secret to recon and all you heard was the amount of time I spent making out.”

I blushed.

He smiled and leaned close. “Be a good girl and let me fix you up, and then maybe I’ll give you one of my famous kisses.”

“Your kisses are famous?” I whispered, silently cursing my sudden one-track mind. Damn if my lower belly wasn’t tightening with the thought of his lips caressing mine.

He didn’t seem fazed at all about the thought of kissing me. Meanwhile, I was sitting here melting into a little puddle, trying not to drool.

Get ahold of yourself, Taylor! I demanded and averted my attention to the many vials of liquid next to me. And beside those were needles.

“What the hell is all that?” I asked.

“Antibiotics, a local numbing agent,” he said, searching through it all. “And real bandages.”

“You’re not sticking me with a needle.” I refused, shaking my head and shrinking against the wall. “Just give me another pill.”

He seemed amused. “You need the antibiotics.”

“How about just a Band-Aid?”

He nodded and I sighed. “You can have one of those too. After you get a shot.”

I scowled and held the coffee between us like a shield. “Stay where you are,” I ordered.

Gently, he took the cup from my grasp and pulled it away, sitting it off to the side on the floor. “Are you afraid of a little needle, Taylor?” he murmured.

“Maybe.” I hedged.

He picked up some kind of wipe and ripped it open, cleaning his hands. Then he reached for another white, wrapped item labeled STERILE SYRINGE and ripped it open.

I shook my head as my knees began to shake. “Get that thing away from me.”

He ignored me and picked up one of the vials and inserted the very pointy needle into the top, slowly drawing some of the liquid into the body of the syringe. “And here I was thinking what a tough girl you were for taking a bullet and barely even complaining.”

“Needles hurt,” I squeaked.

He smiled a smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle. “They don’t hurt that bad.”

I disagreed.

Holding the injection in one hand, he opened another wipe and swiped down the side of my good arm.

“You are not giving me a shot.”

“You’re a terrible patient,” he scolded, setting aside the wipe and leaning close to me. I never noticed how full his lips were until he pursed them, blowing out a stream of oxygen over the damp area the wipe left behind. The breath in my own throat caught. The sensation of his breath moving over my skin heightened my senses. In that moment, I felt hyper aware of him.

“I am not,” I argued, but it was a halfhearted attempt.

“Your breath smells like coffee,” he whispered, dropping his chocolate gaze to my lips.

Just his stare made them tingle. Automatically, I pressed them together, trying to make the sensation stop (or maybe cause it to last longer).

“Have you ever been kissed so good that everything else in the room falls away?” he murmured, brushing the soft pad of his thumb along the edge of my lower lip. “Has a man ever wrapped himself around you so completely that you forgot to think?”

I swallowed, my head swimming at the picture he was painting. The truth was no kiss had ever affected me like that. It was probably why I was still single. Well, that and my father ran off every guy who showed interest in me. He was an unapproachable man, and most men were easily intimidated.

“Tay,” he said, once again calling me by the shortened version of my name. Usually when someone tried to call me that, I bit their head off. But when Brody said it, my insides felt like a snowman on a too-hot day… dissolving into a damp puddle.

“Hmm?” I replied.

“Have you?”

I shook my head.

His lips hovered just over mine while his free hand teased my skin by drawing little circles over the inside of my elbow, and every breath he pulled in pushed his body just a little bit closer to mine. “Would you like to?”

I was drunk just from the sound of his voice. I was hung over from the heat radiating from his body, and I was totally lulled by the gentleness of his touch.

I nodded, a very slight movement of my head. There was no point in lying; my body, my eyes, and even my trembling limbs would betray me.

He dipped just an inch closer, his lips skimming, barely grazing mine, and I sighed at the contact, waiting for him to deepen the kiss.

But he didn’t.

He pulled back swiftly, pinched my arm, and stuck me with the needle.

I yelped as he depressed the end, flooding my system with antibiotics. But the thing was it didn’t hurt, not at all. I was still too tangled up in the fact he hadn’t kissed me. He hadn’t done to me what he said he would.

And for that I was sorely angry.

Angry at myself for falling for it but also at him for not following through.

“You’re an ass,” I said when he pulled away the needle and covered the puncture with a small square of gauze.

“I don’t deny it.” He agreed, dropping the needle beside us and swooping in, taking me off guard yet again.

This time his lips didn’t graze mine. They didn’t taunt my senses. His mouth latched onto mine as if he were a seed and my lips were enriched soil, giving him a place to settle, a place to bloom and grow.

Sadly, I didn’t have much experience in the kissing department, but even so, I didn’t have time to be nervous or self-conscious. It was like his mouth knew exactly where to go, exactly how to move against mine to draw out exactly the response he wanted.

And the response was nothing short of devastating.

He might have been the one in control, yet I felt like everything he did was entirely about me.

The inside of his lip was silky smooth, slightly moist from the heat of his mouth, and every time his lips brushed against mine, I could feel that part of him. It was almost like that feeling you got when you jumped into a pool and water glided across your bare skin for the first time.

Gentle pressure built inside me as we kissed. Brody sucked my lower lip into his mouth, gently tugging on it, teasing its fullness with his tongue. It felt so incredibly right that my hand wrapped around his neck and pulled him closer, demanding more.