“I don’t know if I should kiss you or hit you.” My voice quivers with emotion.

Then I feel reenergized and smack my fist into his hard pectoral and push at his chest so he goes away. I grab his beautiful face and crush his sexy mouth to mine. His taste shudders through me like a gunshot of ecstasy until I yank angrily away and hit his wall-like chest again.

“Your songs made me cry! I missed your voice, your hands! I’m a pining stupid pregnant fool for you, and you want me to stay like some fifth-century good little wife, waiting for you while you’re out there wetting every woman’s fucking panties. I won’t do it. I refuse to be that girl—do you hear me?”

“Yeah, I hear you.” He leans over and slides his fingers to cup the back of my head, then his husky, desire-thickened voice dances over my skin. “Now come here and kiss me again. . . .” He draws me closer and I hit his chest more weakly, moaning in protest.

“Did you touch someone?” I cry, trying to twist free.

He tightens his hold on my nape and fastens his hungry gaze on my lips. “No.”

“Then why didn’t you want to see me? I don’t understand you!”

His eyes flash in frustration. “You don’t have to understand me—just love the hell out of me. Can you do that? Can you?” His thumb drags with sensual roughness across my lower lip. “Do you?”

I can’t reply. While he stares at my mouth with a deliciously carnivorous stare, I’m drinking in the shadowed jaw, the blue eyes, the spiky hair, his high cheekbones and square jaw, the dark slashes of his eyebrows, every beautiful inch of his face, so achingly close that every organ inside my body starts to throb. I hear myself whisper, “Do you still love me?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says.

I moan as his fingers caress the back of my neck, the touch scrambling my brain. He intoxicates me with his nearness, makes me drunk with the smell of his sweat, his soap, him. Every time he’s near, he heightens my senses, and I’m so emotional, all these hours missing him, all these strange hormones, my voice trembles when I speak. “Do you still love me, like before?”

“I’m fucking insane about you!” he cries in disbelief.

I close my eyes and moan softly, clinging fiercely to the words.

“I told you I loved you with every petal of every rose,” he tells me in a low, husky whisper. Then he scrapes the pad of his thumb over my mouth again, more roughly this time, with more need, as his voice, velvet-edged and strong, sends a ripple of heat through me.

“At the institute one of my female doctors got a rose. She told me it was from her husband, because he loved her and he was away. Isn’t that what you send when you’re not there to tell someone you fucking love them? Brooke, I’ve never done this before, but it fucking hurts to look at you through a fucking screen. It hurts to text. It hurts like no fucking punch hurts.”

He spreads his fingers open at the back of my neck as if he needs to touch as much of me as possible, his eyes glowing to such a fierce degree, it only makes my heart thud harder.

“Didn’t you hear the songs!? They were all for you, Brooke. Didn’t you know I thought of you? Missed the hell out of you? If I haven’t showed you I love you, then tell me in what ways I’m fucking this up!”

“I wanted you to want me at the fight! Like you always do. You’ve always wanted me there before. Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you come see me before?”

“God, I want you there like I want nothing! Do you think I enjoy a second of this hell? If I’d come seen you before the fight, you think I’d have the will to leave you? How can you think this is easy for me, Brooke? How?”

The vivid frustration in his eyes cuts me so deep I drop my head, because, no, I don’t think it’s easy for him at all.

“You think you need me, little firecracker?” The gruff question travels all the way through me, and I have to press my thighs together to stop the tremor in me. “Baby, the way you need me can only barely cover half of the way I need you.” The unexpected sadness in his voice yanks my gaze back to his.

“My game is half of what it used to be. I can’t concentrate. I can’t sleep. I can’t get in the game. I’m like a robot out there. I feel a hole right here—right fucking here.” He places his fist over his chest. “I’m trying to protect my girl. Three doctors, three, said she had to be in bed for the first three months, with no travel. I can’t see her, I can’t make love to her—I am trying to do the right thing when my gut screams that SHE belongs with ME.” He narrows his eyes, exhaling roughly through his nose. “Every second that you and I breathe, you belong with me.”

“Remy, I’m sorry. This is driving me crazy too.” I cover my face and try breathing through my constricted throat, but he grabs my wrists and forces my arms to my sides, seizing my gaze with his own, his eyes vividly blue.

“I love you so much.” He engulfs my face in both big, beautiful callused hands. “So fucking much, Brooke, I still don’t know what to do with myself,” he says, and kisses the bridge of my nose with a low, shuddering breath. “I miss everything about you, from the way you smile to the way you look at me to the way the bed smells when you’re with me. I love you like I love nothing in my life, nothing. It eats me up inside like a disease to want to come get you and bring you back with me.”

I start trembling at the end of the bed, all my emotions, all my raging hormones, all my cells, all my being, buzzing at his words. My entire body throbs with love, lust, and the physical agony of being denied my Remy fix for weeks. Shaking, I reach out and lovingly stroke three fingers down the hard line of his jaw. “This,” I say, the word breaking from my lips, “is what I see in my bedroom. This face. This face is all I see, all I see, Remy.”

“Damn you, take this shit off and let me look at my Brooke.”

He grabs my wig and tosses it aside, then he holds my gaze as our smiles fade. The air between us pulses and leaps like our need is a living, breathing thing between us. “Why would anyone want to cover this hair?” Quietly, he eases the net off the top of my head, and the low rustling sound is all that is audible in the room.

Slow, deliciously expert fingers delve into my bun and work to loosen my hair, and the contact of his fingertips against my scalp sends frissons down my spine.

By the time he frees the mahogany strands so they fall on my shoulders, my thighs have dissolved into a puddle along with the rest of me. A thin sheen of sweat coats his thick throat, and his pecs glisten, too. His torso is so tight and so solid it seems as impenetrable as a steel wall, as if nothing can ever hurt him. His arm muscles bulge as he strokes his hands down my hair, and I’m as unraveled as my bun.

When I speak, my voice is as husky as I’ve ever heard it. “I was supposed to be an old groupie.”

“My,” he says, in a whisper that is so much deeper and rougher than mine.

“What?”

“My sweet . . . disobedient . . . favorite little groupie.”

Being called his again . . .

A sound escapes me, and he hears me. Bolts of heat race to my sex as he edges one hand under my dress. Vividly tender blue eyes watch me as his fingers brush up higher inside my thigh, and my heart gallops full speed.

He looks at my mouth, and oh god, I’m flooded with need. He ducks first to taste my mouth, parting it, lipstick and all while, under my dress, his finger slides over the fabric of my panties. His tongue slides over mine, and as he lays me back on the bed, I shiver as I open my mouth and moan softly.

It feels right, right, so right. . . .

He teases the edge at the crotch of my panties; then he eases it aside and his finger directly caresses me. A thunderstorm of desire rages in me as I softly kiss him. He tastes like him, and also of my stupid lipstick, and I’m dying as he guides me open with his finger and then here comes his tongue. Hot and moist, going around mine, then coaxing me to follow him and drink from his mouth as he slowly eases that middle finger inside me.

My body arches to his.

He whispers, into my mouth, “If you can come to my fight, you can come in my arms.”

My breathing goes as he drags his finger inside my channel. I feel me squeeze around him, my body greedy to have anything of his inside me. He adds his thumb to tease my clitoris, and when he edges back to watch my face as he plays with the wettest, hottest part of my body, his mouth is smeared with my lipstick, his jaw is tight with desire, his eyes brilliant blue, his beautiful face staring down at me, and god, I swear he looks as sexy as if some other woman kissed him. I’m jealous of myself and of my lipstick as I thrash and toss my head. “Remington . . .”

He groans and gives me another kiss, this one fast and hard, with a nip of his teeth, before he draws back and withdraws his finger.

Without any hurry at all, he tugs open each and every one of the buttons of my floral dress. Every cell in my body is frenzied as I sit up and help him undo the bottom ones while he undoes the top.

“Quickly, oh, god, touch me,” I gasp.

“Shh,” he croons as he parts the dress right through the middle, easing the fabric aside so he can take me in my white cotton underwear. My nipples poke out through the fabric of my bra, and my panties are damp, and I didn’t think it was even possible for his eyes to get any darker or hungrier than they previously were.

“God, I could eat you.”

Before I know it, he finds the center clasp of my bra with his thumbs, and as he shoves it aside and rubs his fingers around my areolas, he nibbles his way along my mouth, bottom lip, top lip, until he ducks his head and takes one nipple in his mouth.

Oooh, I hear. And it’s me. Making all these noises. Undulating against him.

He rubs the tip of his tongue over the point of my nipple and ripples of pleasure shoot through me. He slides his hand back into my panties, and I drive my fingers into his hair. He seems so hungry, and I’m so thirsty, the instant his middle finger eases into me, I’m so swollen, so wet, so desperate, feeling his mouth sucking on my breast like he’s starved for me, I start coming.

My fingers clutch his hair in a fist, and I make an oooooohing sound as my head falls back as my muscles start contracting and releasing, contracting and releasing, and he moves his finger slowly, dragging out the pleasure for me, as he sucks my breast even harder, unleashing torrent after torrent of pleasure in me.

“Oh god,” I cry, and I rear up to cling to him and turn my face into his neck, where I run my tongue over his delicious taut skin, drinking him desperately. “Oh god, I’m dying for you to make me yours. To feel you. You. Inside me.”

He watches me as I catch my breath, the possessive gleam in his eyes galvanizing me. “I’m not done with you,” he tenderly tells me, making me lick up his wet finger. “I’m going to fuck your mouth with mine, your pussy with my fingers, with my tongue, with any part of me I can. And you’re going to kiss my cock like there’s no tomorrow.”

“I want to kiss your cock now.”

“Not now.” He steps away and strips off his boxing attire until he’s all tanned skin, muscles, tattoos, and . . . My eyes bulge as I watch him take his huge, beautiful erection into the shower and run the tub. He comes to get me, and my eyes burn at the sight of his beautiful standing cock, so close to the star tattoo above it.

I want to kiss that part of him like I want to kiss the rest of him. No. I don’t just want to kiss. I want to lick. Suck. Savor. And claim him, mine, forever and ever.

Before I can grab him and play with him like he played with me, he takes my arm, pulls me to my feet, and then walks me to the huge Jacuzzi tub. Round and bone-colored, it sits in the middle of the room, and as he closes the knobs, I brace myself on one of his arms and dip my feet into the water, then I wait for him to follow me. He steps in behind me and lowers us into the warm water, turning on the Jacuzzi motors as we settle deep.

My eyes drift shut as he envelops me in his arms and immediately starts licking my neck. “Remy . . .” I breathe.

His teeth graze the back of my neck and then he rasps, into my ear, “Nothing in this world tastes as good as you, your skin, your tongue, nothing is as sweet and juicy as your pussy.” He lifts me suddenly from the water and turns me around, but he remains seated in the tub and his face is level with my sex. He spreads his hands on my thighs to part my legs wider and buries his head between my legs, kissing my pussy for a whole minute, stroking my clit with his tongue, then shoving his tongue into my channel. I can feel his growl vibrate all the way through me, and when he’s done tasting to his pleasure, he turns me back around and lowers me back with him.