Page 6 of Unwrapped

“Yeah.”

I kiss her again. Slower this time. Deliberate. Her hands slide up my arms, past the scar on my forearm, over the muscle, into my hair. I pull her forward across the marble until the slab isn’t between us anymore, until she’s pressed against me with caramel and powdered sugar transferring from her apron to my shirt, and neither of us cares.

Later. I’ll tell her everything later.

She pulls back. Her forehead against mine, her breathing unsteady.

“Stay,” she says.

I stay.

4

MILLIE

He stays.

His mouth is on mine, my back against the counter, his hands steady on my waist. The caramel batch I scored twenty minutes ago is hardening on the marble behind me. I can feel it cooling without looking. I know the timing by feel.

I pull back. “The batch. I need to wrap it before the edges crack.”

He lets me go. No argument, no negotiation. I slide along the counter, pick up the bench scraper, and start popping the scored squares free. He watches from the other side of the slab.

“You want to learn?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I slide the copper pot of warm caramel toward him. Holding temperature on the back burner all evening—liquid, amber, perfect. I hand him a spoon, put my hand over his, and guide the motion. Slow circles, scraping the bottom where the sugar catches. His hand is warm under mine, rough at the knuckles.

“You feel how it pulls?” I say. “That’s soft-ball. That’s what you want for caramels.”

“How do you test it?”

I pull a clean spoon, dip it, and let the caramel cool for three seconds on my fingertip. Warm enough to read, cool enough not to burn.

“Here,” I say, and hold my finger up to his mouth.

Muscle memory. I’ve tested batches ten thousand times—fingertip in the caramel, touch it to my tongue, read the flavor. The only difference is that I’m holding my finger to someone else’s mouth, and his blue eyes have gone dark in the copper light, and this is no longer a candy-making demonstration.

His mouth closes over my finger. The heat rushes up my arm—his lips, his tongue against the pad of my fingertip, tasting me as much as the sugar. He holds my wrist, keeps my finger at his mouth a beat longer than the caramel needs.

He releases me. My hand drops. My pulse is hammering in places I didn’t know had a pulse.

He dips his finger into the pot. He brings it to my mouth. I open my lips, close them around his finger, taste the caramel and his skin underneath—warm, rough, sweet, salt. His jaw tightens. The muscle at the hinge flexes once, hard.

“Tell me what you want, Millie,” he says. “Whatever it is. Tell me, and that’s what happens.”

Nobody has ever asked me what I want. They ask what I’m offering, what I’m giving. Nobody has ever stood in front of me and said your turn.

I pull the apron string at the small of my back. The knot gives.

“You,” I say. “I want you.”

I let the apron fall to the floor in a heap, and the thin straps of my tank top slip down my shoulders as I reach for him. Weston’s hands slide up my ribs, thumbs brushing the undersides of my breasts through the fabric. The copper sconces cast everything in warm, flickering gold, turning the powdered sugar dusting the slab into glittering frost.

“I’ve never done this,” I whisper against his mouth, my voice shaking. “I’m a virgin, Weston. I want you—God, I want you so bad—but I need you to know that.”

He stills, forehead pressed to mine, breathing ragged. “Millie…we can stop. We don’t have to⁠—”