Page 26

I hadn’t moved a muscle other than to make sure my lips were still attached to my mouth. And to pull out my phone to text Mac.

Best first kiss in the history of ever.

Need details. Stat.

Meg?

Meg?

MEG?

OMG, are you still kissing??

ELEVEN

Art bounced back up the stairs, taking them three at a time. His face split into a grin when he saw me standing right where he’d left me.

“I bought us a little more time.”

My phone clattered to the floor as he cupped my face in his hands again and murmured, “Now, where were we?” before gently pressing his lips to mine in a kiss that deepened almost instantly.

After a long breathless while, he pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against mine again. This close, his face was a little blurry, but not so much that I couldn’t read the intense longing in his eyes as they bored into mine. It echoed the desire making my heart pound.

I was too close to see his full smile, but the corners of his mouth twitched up as I gasped and my back arched when he slipped his hand around to the back of my head to gently trace the hairline along my nape with his pinkie finger. His touch sent a shiver down my spine that rippled out to my extremities.

“We could be together for a thousand years, and that would never get old,” he murmured, brushing his lips against mine so tenderly it made my soul ache.

“Kissing me?” I asked, pressing my lips harder against his.

His smile broadened against my mouth. “Well, yes, that. But I meant that little noise that you make when I touch you somewhere sensitive.” As if to illustrate his point, he trailed his finger down my neck and along my collarbone. My back arched again and the tiniest of whimpers escaped as I sucked in a sharp breath. “That one.”

I chuckled and smiled back at him, my mouth barely leaving his. “You mean that noise you’ve only heard me make two or three times?”

“Four,” he murmured, pulling his mouth from mine to trail kisses along the path his finger had just taken. “But I already know I want to hear it often.”

“Is that so?” I replied, doing my best but utterly failing to not squirm, arch my back, or moan as his lips and beard traveled up the side of my neck, igniting every nerve along the way. When his mouth reached the spot where my hair ended and the sensitive area behind my ear started, I gave up all pretense as my legs buckled, and I collapsed into his arms, my entire body and soul vibrating with the need to be closer to this man I’d almost let slip through my fingers.

An unbearably short amount of time later, which could well have been hours for all I knew, Art pulled his mouth away from mine with a sigh of regret and kissed my forehead tenderly before pulling me against him in a bear hug that should have made me feel trapped and vulnerable, but instead made me feel like I had finally come home.

“I have to go figure out where we’re going to spend the night.”

“Where you’re going to spend the night?” As I asked, pulling back to see his face, something he’d said earlier resurfaced. “Right. You said something about a leak. What happened?”

He made a face. “The last renter of the short-term rental we were supposed to move into today didn’t fully turn off the water in the tub. Something got stuck in the overflow. Long story short, the bathroom flooded, but since no one was staying there the ceiling gave way. The tub was in the living room when he let us in. Pretty claw-footed thing. Didn’t match the decor, though. Neither did all the plaster everywhere.”

“Oh, that is not good,” I said, sucking in a sharp breath through my teeth.

Art laughed. “That might be the understatement of the century. It was a mess. I feel bad for the guy. He says that between letting the place dry out and redoing the floor, it’s going to take weeks to fix.”

“Presumably, he has insurance, right?” I asked. Something was throwing me off, but I couldn’t put my finger on what.

“Yeah, but that’ll cover the repairs, not the loss of income from renting it out,” Art said with a grimace. “He was really upset. I wish there was something I could have done for him.”

Cocking my head, I studied his face, looking for signs that the compassion in his voice was feigned, but all I saw was genuine concern for a man he’d probably spent all of twenty minutes talking to.

“You really mean it, don’t you?” I asked.

In his shoes, Jim would have been ranting to everyone he ran into about his poor luck and how annoyed he was that his stay in Scotland was off to such a bad start. Then he would have gone off about the cost of finding a new place, and how everyone would know he was desperate for a place to stay and were sure to take advantage of him. He would have been both livid about the situation and feasting on the drama, calling everyone he knew to share the story, which would have grown more far-fetched with each retelling. At some point, no doubt, the tub would be coming down almost on top of them, or something equally sensational and absurd.