“I want to try something,” I whispered, untying his board shorts. I tugged them down over his hips and they fell to the floor. Rhodes was so hard, so ready. He kicked the shorts to the side and stared down at me as I took him in my hand. Groaning, he flexed into my grasp as I moved my hand up and down his length in a slow and steady rhythm. Hesitantly, I bent forward and just barely touched his tip with my lips.

Rhodes growled, grabbing my chin between his forefinger and thumb and tilting my face to meet his. “Natalie,” he breathed. I wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a plea.

“I want to try,” I repeated, swallowing. “But I need you to show me how.” I’d never gone down on Mason, mostly because I’d never had any desire to see him come apart at my touch. With Rhodes, it was all I craved. I wanted to make him feel the way he made me feel — powerful, wanted, sexy.

He cursed, looking up to the ceiling like God would help him maintain composure. I took it as permission, sliding my tongue flat against his length before taking him in my mouth. He groaned, rolling his hips in time with my mouth, careful to not push too deep.

Grabbing my hand in his own, he showed me how to stroke him where my mouth wouldn’t meet. He coached me through swirling my tongue and when I pulled him in too deep and gagged, he moaned. Apparently, gagging was a good thing.

Who knew?

I did it again, pulling him in a little deeper and letting my natural reflexes take over. This time, he cursed and pulled back.

“You’re trying to kill me.”

“On the contrary. I’m trying to make you come.”

Rhodes smirked at my forwardness and I blushed. He bent to my lips, covering them with his own and slowly laying me back on the thin mattress. Effortlessly, he stripped my clothes off, piece by piece, littering the treehouse with them as he did. When he slid between my legs, pressing his hard on against my inner thigh, my breath caught and I held on tight to his biceps. He reached blindly for his wallet, but I grabbed his hand with my own.

“I just want you.”

Rhodes furrowed his brows, unsure. I’d been on birth control for two weeks and I wanted nothing more than to feel him, only him, inside me. I physically ached for that uncensored connection.

“Please,” I thrusted my hips up to meet his, the tip of him sliding to my wet opening. He inhaled stiffly, pressing his forehead to mine.

“You’re so light, Natalie.” He shook his head, but gripped me tighter. “I’m afraid I’ll ruin you with my darkness.”

I kissed him hard, tugging on his bottom lip with my teeth as I struggled for a way to make him understand.

Pressing my hands firmly against his chest, I slipped from beneath him and crossed the room. I blew out the candle on the small coffee table before moving to the next in the small kitchen. One by one, I extinguished the flames before making my way back to him.

He pulled me to straddle his lap and I locked my fingers behind his neck. I could barely see him, only the soft natural light from the stars and moon sneaking in through the open windows lit the house. Still, I could feel every inch of him pressed against me, I could hear his heart hammering in his chest, I could smell the scent of his body wash mixed with his desire.

“Sometimes, the darkness is where you find yourself.” Carefully, I slid down onto his length, feeling every naked inch of him for the first time as I took control. “Let me find myself in you.”

Rhodes groaned, his jaw falling slack as he tilted his eyes to the sky.

He rolled his hips into me and I gasped at the fullness. We blindly felt for each other, kissing and touching to find where we wanted to be. His breaths were in my ear, his tongue was on my skin. He was everywhere. I was nowhere. He completely surrounded me.

Just like the darkness.

It was in the moonlit shadows of that night that I found myself. Rhodes wanted to inspire me, but the truth was that it was the possibility of what we could be together that inspired me most. For one night, even if that was all there could be, I lived inside a passion I never knew existed with a man I never saw coming.

Rhodes was an unanticipated thunderstorm.

And I danced in his rain.

“So let me get this straight,” Willow said, tucking her long, caramel-colored legs underneath her. They were dark against the soft yellow of her new dorm room comforter. “Rhodes is actually his last name, but you can’t tell me what his first name is because it’s personal?”

I nodded, smiling at the screen of my laptop where Willow was framed in a video chat window. It was Wednesday, my day off from training, so we made sure to schedule time to catch up. She had already shown me her room and told me every detail about her first college party, and now we had moved on to Rhodes, which was always her favorite topic of conversation.

“And the same Rhodes who made Nathan Arnold piss himself during weightlifting practice from simply yelling at him to move benches took you on a canoe trip down Edisto River to a beautiful tree house tucked into the trees, where you let him teach you how to suck his wang?”

I blushed, covering my face with my pillow. “Lo!”

“Well, am I on track so far?”

Rolling my eyes, I waved my hand at her to continue, cocking a brow in amusement.

“So you had this super romantic weekend together, which is already weird because it’s Rhodes, but on top of it all, you did so with both of you knowing in the back of your mind that he found a note on his bike that said to stay away from you and he thinks it’s written in his dead sister’s handwriting?”

“Willow,” I warned, shaking my head. “Have a little respect.”

“Okay, his assumed-to-be-dead sister.”

“That’s not any better.”

“But am I right?”

I sighed, tucking my pillow closer to my chest and resting my chin on the edge. “Pretty much.”

Willow clicked her tongue. “Jeepers, chica. I think your summer is more interesting than my entire life.” I chuckled, not moving my head from its resting place on the pillow. She watched me through the screen for a moment. “You really like him, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“It scares the shit out of you.” She said it as a statement, not a question. I simply nodded again.

“It’s just, when I first met Rhodes, he was so closed off to me. To the world. And now that he’s letting me in, it’s like he’s pulling me down fast into an ocean of feelings I’ve never felt before.”