Her mouth had dropped open slightly. She sucked in a huge breath as her grip on his ankles tightened in a convulsive squeeze. But before she could speak, he held up a staying hand. Asked the crucial question, while he still had the nerve.
“After you came back? Brought my collection home, so you wouldn’t see.” His throat hurt, it was so goddamn dry. “Want to see it now?”
“You...” She spoke slowly. “You know what will happen if I go home with you.”
“Yeah.” He held her stare, heart thudding like an overloaded stand mixer. “I do.”
“Then...” A grin gradually dawned on that beautiful face, wide and heart-piercingly bright. “As you might put it, Karl...”
He waited, unable to breathe.
“Let’s fuckinggo,” she told him, and they did.
18
Molly followed Karl to his white-painted split-level—clearly built at least half a century ago, but maintained well—in her rental car. They met at the sidewalk, and he grabbed for her hand and kept hold of it all the way up the three steps to the front porch, as if worried she might flee if given the opportunity, then immediately reclaimed his grip once he’d dealt with the door and locked it behind them again.
He should know better. The foundations of this house could crumble, and she’d simply plant herself on his cock in the dusty rubble. If aliens invaded? They’d get a live-action demonstration of human anatomy, because her eagerness had turned into outright impatience sometime over the past few days. She was done waiting.
Even apart from her uncharacteristic, lust-honed edginess, she felt... odd. Giddy, almost. Disoriented by a sudden, unexpected sense of...
She wasn’t certain.
How did a circuit feel after years of failed attempts at connection, at spanning an unbridgeable gap, when the final, necessary wire slotted into place? When electricity hummed at last, powering movement and light?
And if some sort of internal circuit had been completed, she knew precisely why and how: Their intimate conversation on the quilt beneath the willow had shifted the necessary components.Her charged lust for Karl hadn’t changed, but... something inside her had settled into place with each revelation he’d offered. Her resistance had softened with each supportive response to her own confessions, each sign that he’d wanted and cared about her much longer and much more intensely than she’d ever realized.
Bravo toCorporations Monthly. The same magazine that helped business leaders avoid fair taxation and exert undue influence on the political system could also, apparently, help two childhood never-quite-sweethearts reach an understanding, at long freaking last.
Inside the small foyer of Karl’s childhood home, she dropped her bag beside the door, and the rickety console table shuddered as he flung his phone, wallet, and keys into the clay bowl on top. He tugged her deeper into the house, and the faint buzz of a refrigerator accompanied them up a short set of carpeted steps. His bedroom apparently lay at the end of the postage-stamp hall, whose walls were entirely lined with framed family photos. As he ushered her through the bedroom doorway, rosy late-afternoon light streamed through the lone, half-open window and turned his ruddy hair to flame.
Neither of them had spoken a word since leaving their cars.
Still holding his hand, still silent, she looked around herself. The king-size bed, topped by rumpled gray sheets and another faded quilt, dominated the room. Apart from a battered dresser and a matching nightstand, there was no other furniture. No room for other furniture either.
Then she couldn’t see anything but Karl, because his fingers were delving into her hair, his other hand was cupping her jaw with tense care, and his mouth covered hers in a fierce, hard kiss. Too needy to tease, she returned it without hesitation. Her tonguemet his in a twisting, playful battle for dominance that made her blood feel carbonated, fizzy and tickling as it effervesced through her veins.
When she sucked on the tip of his agile tongue, he lurched even closer. Backed her up against the side of the bed, one big, warm hand sliding down to cup her ass. He squeezed. Molded her. Kneaded her giving flesh and hauled her tighter against him. Dizzy with excitement, she shifted her thighs for friction and rubbed against him without a single iota of shame, and his erection grew with her every movement, pressing almost painfully hard into her thigh.
He was throwing off heat like one of his ovens, melting every too-stiff bone in her body. When his teeth scored her lower lip, her knees went wobbly, and she sank down onto the soft, cool sheets, then down onto her back. He immediately stepped between her dangling legs and bent at the waist, forearm braced on the mattress as he cradled her nape and kept kissing her. She explored him with eager hands, stroking down his taut, flushed neck, over his bunched shoulders, along the thick muscles bracketing the groove of his spine.
After one last squeeze of her ass, his own hand slipped from beneath her, skimmed over her hip and the side of her belly, up to her breast, and paused. His knuckles lightly skimmed over her nipple, back and forth, for a freaking eternity. Then his loose fist uncurled, his thumb rubbed slow circles around her areola, and her breath hitched and caught.
His palm weighed her breast, and his mouth ripped free from hers. Moved lower.
“So goddamn soft,” he muttered. “Knew you would be, butshit.”
He nudged the hard tip of her nipple with his nose. His hotbreath seeped through the thin cotton of her shirt, warming her. Then he licked her, his tongue flicking and rubbing through the barrier of fabric. And maybe the sensation wasn’t as sharp as skin-on-skin contact, but she was buzzing with pleasure anyway. Arching her back. Pushing herself closer in a demand for more.
He stilled, panting, and he smelled like sunshine and grass. She turned her head to nuzzle his inner forearm and opened her mouth for a taste. Salt, atop tough muscle from backbreaking work. Velvety skin.
His flesh prickled when she followed a raised vein with the tip of her tongue.
When he spoke again, his voice was shredded. “Okay if I undress you?”
“Yes.” She dropped her arms and spread them in open invitation. “Please.”
As he undid her shirt buttons, his fingers fumbling in an impatient rush, she sighed in relief. She just... needed them unclothed. No barriers. Only the two of them, open and honest and bare.
