We’re going to take one more short contract before heading back to Fontana Ridge, and although I’m excited to go somewhere new, I’m going to miss this little slice of wild paradise. The crashing of the waves on the cliffs. The dew clinging to the trees and the damp air. The way everything here is more green than I could have ever even imagined.
“Anything appealing to you?” I ask.
“I haven’t looked yet.” He nudges me with his shoulder. “Wanted to look with you.”
A smile plays at the corners of my lips. I find myself doing it a lot. Smiling. At Jack. Into the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. At the way the freezing water feels when we run into it in the morning after a run along the sand. Behind a wine glass as we attempt to look like we know what we’re doing during a tasting. At everything and nothing.
Jack pulls up the email from Amy and leans into me, holding the phone between us. “Pheonix, Arizona. New York City.”
“Could be fun,” I say.
He nods into my shoulder and continues reading, “Cape Landing, Maine. Boston. Nashville, Tennessee.”
“That’s where my cousins live. Could be cool to be close to them.”
He lifts his head. “Want to go there?”
I shrug. “We have time to decide.”
His lips curve in a grin. “That we do.”
When he leans forward and presses his mouth to mine, it doesn’t feel rushed anymore. It feels as easy as breathing. We’re not trying to devour each other, touch and taste as much of each other as quickly as we can. We have all the time in the world.
Jack tastes like coffee and the toothpaste he always uses first thing in the morning before he even finds his way into the kitchen. His lips are cold from the nip in the air, but they quickly warm from the friction against mine. He’s smooth as he takes the coffee cup from my hand, depositing it behind us, and lifting me into his lap. He’s solid beneath me, as steady as he was that first night we met when my world was falling apart.
His mouth never stays on mine for long. He’s greedy for the rest of my skin, his lips trailing over my jaw and neck, his hands finding their way beneath my shirt, pressing against my spine.I gasp at the chill of them, and he returns his mouth to mine, swallowing the sound.
“You better be quiet,” he says. “Or the neighbors will hear you.”
This campground is fairly secluded in the middle of winter, but there are enough people around that I should be embarrassed if any of them were to come out and find me straddling him. I can’t bring myself to care, though.
Not when his mouth is insistent and his hands are confident as they move over my skin, teasing, never reaching where I want them.
“I love the way you taste,” he whispers into the spot behind my ear. The one he discovered always makes me shiver and writhe against him.
I’m about to tell him that I love the way he tastes, too. That I love the way his scruff feels against the sensitive skin of my neck, and how I sometimes find fingerprint-shaped bruises on my hips that make me blush. I’m about to tell him I love him.
But my phone trills in my pocket, an alarm.
I pull back, reaching for it, but Jack comes with me, licking a stripe up the column of my neck. It makes my hands shake with want, my body hum with anticipation.
“You’re going to have to let me go,” I say on a laugh, still trying to pull away from his mouth. He only pulls me closer, settling me more tightly against him.
“No, thanks.”
“It’s time for book club.”
His head moves back, brows sewing together. “It’s six in the morning.”
“Not in North Carolina.”
“It’s nine in the morning there.”
I shrug. “It’s the only time that would work for everyone.”
He lets out a beleaguered sigh that I know is all for show. “Fine, if you must.”
I press a kiss to his jaw. “You have to get ready for work anyway.”
