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“No.” She shook her head for emphasis. “We are never, ever getting back together.”
He crossed his arms. “Famous last words, Taylor Swift.”
She mimicked his pose. “Josh…Roger’s gay. Right now he’s with his gay boyfriend, on a gay cruise, enjoying seven days of shipboard gaiety.”
All right, he had not seen that coming. All he could do was stare back at her for a moment while his brain digested her words. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘Oh.’” She uncrossed her arms, rested them on the island, and used the edge of her thumb to trace the wood grain. “He hasn’t come out to anyone in Bluelick except me, and he doesn’t wish to, so you need to keep this information to yourself.” Her eyes flickered up to his.
“What information?”
The lame joke produced a tiny smile. She resumed tracing the grain. “Thanks. I asked him for permission to tell you, because I wanted you to understand why the man I was engaged to for so long feels more like a brother to me than an ex. I’m sure I talk about him a lot, but he’s been in my life forever. I grew up with him. He was my first date, my first kiss, my first…everything.”
“Yep, sounds just like a brother.” But his instincts had been right, as far as they’d gone.
“Shut up. All those firsts occurred a long time ago. My point is, he’s a huge part of my past, and there’s nothing I could or would do to change that. But”—she looked at him again, and this time her gaze held—“he’s not my future. In the future, I’d like to get my dates, kisses, and…everything else”—she eyed him meaningfully—“from men I don’t feel the least bit brotherly toward.”
So that’s where he came in. A lot of answers fell into place. Her uncertainty, her vulnerability, her motives for getting involved with him? Everything stemmed from her relationship with Roger. But she wouldn’t be reconciling with her ex, and she was obviously ready to make up for lost time.
“So, Roger’s giving you advice on how to please a man?”
Her eyes shifted away. She suddenly took great care smoothing the hem of her T-shirt. “Sort of. Why? Did he steer me wrong?”
“No. I’m willing to concede he wasn’t completely off base. But from here on out, how ’bout we falter along on our own?”
She tipped her head and fluttered her eyelashes—all angelic innocence. “Should I assume this means you don’t want to do it under the bleachers at the high school, while I’m dressed in my cheerleading uniform?”
Holy shit. An image of her in a snug sleeveless sweater and a short pleated skirt, bouncing all over the damn place, filled his head, and his biggest, hardest best stood up to join in the cheer. “You know what? I changed my mind. Consult Roger all you want. Just be ready.” He lifted her up and sat her on the kitchen island, then leaned over her until he had her draped across the surface. “I’ve consulted my expert, too.”
“Y-your expert?”
“You had him in your mouth a minute ago.” With that he pushed her long shirt up past her waist and yanked her leggings and panties down to her knees. “Better hold on to something, Bluelick, because you’re about to find out where else he likes to go.”
Chapter Ten
The intense, almost feral sound of his voice sent a shiver down her spine. Was she ready? Her body responded with an enthusiastic yes, but her brain insisted on making sure they’d talked through the Roger issue. “Wait—”
“No more waiting.” He pulled off her pants and underwear, freeing her from the shackles of her tangled clothes. “I’ve been waiting too long to be inside you.” His hitched his hands under her thighs and lifted her legs to his hips. Obedient to his silent instructions, she wrapped them around his waist, and bit her lip to keep from moaning, while a thrilled little voice in her head said, Sweet Jesus, he’s going to have you right h
ere in your kitchen. Naughty games in her place of work were one thing—there was some innate thrill about doing it at work—but here, among her ribbon-trimmed dish towels and the ceramic owl cookie jar from her great-grandma? He couldn’t possibly find anything stimulating about these surroundings, which meant she’d brought this on all by herself. Just her.
The truth of that excited her as much as anything else. She couldn’t quite stop herself from lifting her hips to hurry him along. He grabbed her butt and pulled her toward him—which had her scrambling to hold on to the edge of the island—and then let her go, leaving her clinging to the counter with her legs clamped around his waist. Her already-strained quadriceps complained, but it was a minor discomfort compared to the relentless ache at her core. His zipper rasped, and then his hands were back on her and he tugged her closer still. His erection slid unerringly along her center. Every instinct in her body urged her to grind against him, but he must have read her mind because he said, “Don’t you move a muscle. It’s my turn to play.”
She held herself still as best she could, because fair was fair, but hopefully her vocal cords didn’t count as muscles because staying quiet turned out to be impossible. Her moans didn’t completely cover the wet stroke of his shaft along her juncture.
When her calves, thighs, and glutes pulled so tight she worried she’d give herself a charley horse, he calmly asked, “Do you want to move?”
“Yes.”
Next thing she knew, he had his big hand wrapped around her ankle, parting her legs, bending one as he lifted it. “Get your knee up there. Now.”
Oh God, not the movement she had in mind. She reinforced her grip on the lip of the island and used her stomach muscles to lift her leg and hook it over his shoulder. Logically, she wasn’t any more exposed right now that she had been the other night when he’d had her kneeling on the exam table, but something about being bare from the waist down, spread-eagled across the top of her kitchen island, had heat flooding her cheeks even as a new wave of dampness flooded her core.
“Jesus, look at you,” he muttered.
Literally nothing prevented him from looking his fill, she realized, and tried to imagine what he could see. A view nobody else in the world had been privy to, that was for certain. “Touch me,” she whispered, and rested her head on the butcher block.
“I want to do so much more than touch you. I want to put my mouth on every inch of you. Nobody else went down between your legs and tasted you before, did they? Nobody but me.”
