True panic floods me when I hear more screeching. The guys seem to be piling chairs against the door and jamming them against the doorknob. I mean, what the fuck?

After the screeching, there’s a bang. “Careful, Kenna, she bites!” one of the twins calls out, laughing again.

Mackenna swears under his breath and jiggles the doorknob. Their laughter intensifies, so he stops trying and turns around. The light that seeps in under the door causes attractive shadows to hit his profile as he looks at me. “All right, I’m not giving the assholes the amusement they want.”

I raise one eyebrow in an are-you-serious gesture.

He raises his eyebrows in an I’m-deadly-serious gesture.

I bite the inside of my cheek and slide down to sit on the floor, sighing dramatically.

He drops down too, and suddenly it’s so much more cramped in here. He’s so near. His thigh is all against mine. Hard as rock, and it’s having an unwanted effect on me. This is the nearest I’ve had him since . . .

Hell, I don’t know, my brain can’t get past his thigh. Against mine. Being this close to Mackenna, and his fucking X factor, is pure torture. My female parts are as responsive to him as the rest of the world is. My lungs feel leaden as I try to breathe, but every breath smells of him, and his eyes glow in the dark as he studies my profile in the silence.

The air feels charged between us. I feel awkward, like I want to say something. I guess we’d better start fighting. So I open my mouth.

“Don’t fucking ruin this,” he says in a voice that’s low and commanding.

Startled, I snap my mouth shut.

But my anger resurfaces when he leans forward and a strange surge of anticipation runs through me. “Come any closer and you’ll find my knee in your balls,” I warn.

He stops advancing and laughs softly. “You’ve been thinking of my balls, haven’t you?”

“Only how much I’d like to chop them, slice them, and add salsa to them.”

“And have them against a nice juicy taco. Hmm.”

“Ohmigod! You’re disgusting!”

I try to push him, and he catches my hands in his warm ones, making me gasp when he pins them over my head, against the wall. Outrage bubbles in my veins. I feel so trapped and helpless, and suddenly my heart is going a mile a minute, pumping in my throat. A crazy, wild wave of lust follows my outrage.

God. Seven hours of this?!?!

I groan in protest. The sound of my groan seems to do something to him, because he tightens his hold and weighs even more heavily on me. All two hundred pounds of muscled him. Our eyes hold each other’s in the darkness, and the electricity rushes through me as I warn, “Let go.”

“You don’t mean that.”

I struggle futilely, and he tightens his hold. I nod. Yes, yes I do. I do mean it. But he transfers both my wrists to only one hand and leans his head against mine. The thundering of my heart echoes in my brain as his breath bathes my face. Oh god, he’s so close, and I’ve dreamed about being this close, in dreams and nightmares, during the day and during the night . . . I’ve dreamed of his eyes and how I used to find them always staring at me through those thick lashes of his. I’d dream and think of his lips. The top one shaped like a bow, almost as full as the bottom, the bottom one so plush and curved . . .

And then he kisses me, placing that mouth on me, cupping my head in his free hand, and parting my lips with the same lips I hadn’t realized I’d been staring at in painful hunger. The unexpectedness of his kiss makes me struggle halfheartedly to wrench free. I don’t want to want this. I don’t want this soul-searing thirst, the dreadful, inescapable feeling that I’ll break if he kisses me and I’ll break if he doesn’t. I whimper, as though it would make him have mercy on me. He doesn’t. He groans softly and tries slipping his tongue into my mouth, and when I part my lips and let him taste me because I’m clearly out of my mind, suicidal, and horny, I make a sound I haven’t ever made in my life. More than a moan or a whimper, a sound of true, quiet pain. He pulls back when I do, and so do I.

We both stare, in shock.

“Asshole,” I hear myself murmur, breathing hard.

“Bitch.”

He looks at my lips, and my sex squeezes in reaction as he lowers his head and covers my lips again, more viciously, with his own groan of pleasure.

For a fraction of a second, my body is a trembling mass of contradictions. My hands have not touched any man. Only a boy. Seventeen. Before he got the tattoo that peeks on the inside of his forearm. Before he became larger than life, a star, before he grew up to be this man.

One second, I’m a woman with a thousand walls, who rarely touches anyone or allows a hug. In the next, I’m six years younger, and he’s the guy I let in. I don’t want that girl to take over, but I live in her. This is her skin, and nobody can make it tremble like he does.

I’m not only trembling, I feel like I’m burning from the inside out. A hot, quivering mess of desire under his lips. The same lips that sing crap about me, hurt me, haunt me, somehow remain the most beautiful lips I’ve ever seen, felt, or tasted. God. Tasted.

In a sudden frenzy I grab his shoulders, my tongue pushing hungrily into his mouth, my hips rolling toward his. God, I hate this fucking asshole.

I hate him for making me feel like this after all these years.

But my hands have a mission. Memorizing the texture of him. The feel of him. How he’s changed in six years. He’d been long and lean before and now he’s longer and harder. Smoother. Bigger. No more teen limbs, now he’s all thickness of a man, and though my arms are now free to roam, my head is trapped under the weight of his kiss. And I can’t get enough of his hot, wet, thirsty, mean, dirty, delicious mouth!