Page 56 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The kiss went deep and filthy in seconds, tongues stroking, teasing, her little moan vibrating straight into my chest as I sucked on her lower lip and then delved back in, devouring the soft, slick heat of her.

“Still keeping score?” I murmured against her lips, voice rough.

“Always,” she breathed, nipping my bottom lip before kissing me harder, her fingers threading into my hair and tugging.

Our bodies pressed flush again, skin sliding hot against skin, hearts pounding in tandem. Only when the kisses finally softened into lazy, lingering presses did I reach over and switch off the lamp, and outside the moonlight finished its slow work on the window, sealing the two of us in silver.

Much later, when she’d gone heavy and warm against my side, and her breathing had evened out into sleep, I lay awake in the dark grinning at the ceiling like a fool.

Stove off. Door locked. Elizabeth Starling asleep in my arms.

Chapter 23

Elizabeth

Iwoke up warm. That’s the first thing I noticed, before I knew where I was or what day it was or why my whole body felt like a rung bell—warmth, wall to wall, the deep kind that gets all the way into your spine. I surfaced through it slow, like coming up through bathwater, into a gray-gold morning I didn’t recognize.

Frost lace on an unfamiliar window. A maple branch ticking the glass in the wind, down to its last stubborn leaves, each one lit up like a lantern by the early sun. Sheets that smelled like cedar and clean laundry and him. Matt was asleep on his side beside me, curled toward me with one arm dead-weighted across my waist like he’d fallen asleep mid-claim, and I lay very still in the early light and let myself have the full inventory.

The lashes. The jaw gone soft with sleep, all that watchfulness off duty for once, and underneath it a face I’d never fully seen before—younger, almost unguarded, yet still faintly worried about something, like even his dreams were keeping an eye on things.

Every morning of my life I have woken up bracing, running the day’s list before my feet hit the floor. That morning I woke up warm in a quiet house with a heavy arm across my waist and Matt Hartford breathing slow and deep beside me, and I couldn’t find the list anywhere. I looked at him until the sun moved on the wall, my chest tight with a tenderness I wasn’t ready to name. I have spent a lot of cold mornings in my life. I hadn’t known, until that one, what a warm one could do to a person—how it could crack open something guarded and scared inside me and let the light pour straight in.

I was easing out from under his arm to find the bathroom when it tightened like a tow strap and hauled me clean back across the mattress into his chest. “No,” he said, into my hair. Gravel. Half asleep. Non-negotiable.

“Good morning to you too.”

“It’s early. Stay.”

“I was coming back. I’m not leaving⁠—”

“Don’t go.” His hand splayed warm over my stomach, and his mouth found the back of my neck, and the last word of that sentence left the building entirely.

Morning was different. The night before had been all held breath and lamplight and finally, two people getting somewhere they’d been walking toward for a whole season.

Morning was slower and braver, because morning has light in it, and there is nowhere to hide in a bright room.

He rolled me under him with the sun full on both of us, propped on his elbows, taking his time about everything. “Let me look at you.

I lay there in the full morning light with the frost melting off the window and let Matt Hartford look at me. His hands learned me again by daylight like the night before had been a rough draft.

He kissed his way down my body with that same patient thoroughness, pausing to taste the undersides of my breasts, the dip of my navel, the sensitive crease where my thigh met my hip. When he settled between my legs, broad shoulders spreading me open to the morning light, he looked up at me—eyes dark, voice low and rough. “Elizabeth. Can I taste you?”

Heat flooded my face and between my thighs. “Yes,” I whispered, then louder, “God, yes—please, Matt.” The vulnerability of it—of being so openly wanted, so openly seen—made my heart race even as my body arched toward him.

The first slow drag of his tongue over my center pulled a broken sound from my throat. He groaned against me like I was the best thing he’d ever tasted, licking broad and wet from entrance to clit, then focusing on the swollen bundle of nerves with firm, rhythmic strokes.

Two thick fingers slid inside me, curling and stroking while his mouth worked—sucking gently, then harder, tongue flicking fast and relentless until my hips bucked against his face and my fingers tightened desperately in his hair.

He held me down with one strong forearm across my hips, devouring me without mercy, the wet sounds and his low appreciative moans filling the sunlit room. I heard myself say his name in a voice with no performance in it anywhere, three times, four.

“Matt,” I gasped, and then again, raw and helpless, “Matt—Matt—” The maple ticked the glass, and the last leaves came down sunlit past the window one at a time like the whole tree was applauding, and I came apart in the morning light with my hands fisted in his hair and his mouth at my ear telling me, low and wrecked, exactly how long he’d wanted this.

“Been waiting for you for months,” he rasped, voice breaking on the words. “So damn long, Elizabeth. Just like this—” and then he stopped talking altogether as I trembled through the aftershocks.

I was still pulsing when he kissed his way back up, mouth shiny and tasting of me as he claimed mine in a deep, filthy kiss. “God, Elizabeth,” he murmured against my lips, voice rough with awe and a little stunned, like the words were slipping out before he could stop them, “you’re so fucking beautiful like this—so sweet and perfect.” His eyes traced every inch of me in the sunlight, hot and reverent. “I could spend all day just looking at you… tasting you… fucking you until you can’t think straight.”

The words hit me like a spark—Matt Hartford, my steady, by-the-book cop, talking like that. My eyes widened in surprise, a rush of heat flooding my cheeks and straight between my thighs.