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‘How did you meet Merida?’ Abe asked. ‘Was it when you shared a flat?’
‘No, we were at the same school for a year,’ Naomi said. ‘I was moved on, but we kept in touch. She wanted to be an actress and I wanted to be a paediatric nurse but the teacher said we were both dreaming.’
‘Why?’ He frowned. ‘I get they might say that about acting...’
‘I was very behind at school,’ Naomi said. ‘I was never going to make the grades to get into nursing.’
‘It doesn’t sound as if you had the most stable schooling.’
‘You make me sound like a horse.’ She aimed for a smile but he refused to allow her to joke her way out of it.
‘Listen.’ He took her face in his hands and his thumbs brushed at the tears but they kept spilling again. It felt to her as if he had tapped a river, it felt as if all the hurt she held inside heallowedto come out. And where most ran from raw emotion, he fostered it. ‘I’m sure that if a nurse is what you want to be then you could do it.’
Still held by his hands, she shook her head, because she didn’t want to be a nurse any more.
‘I don’t know what I want,’ Naomi admitted.
Except that wasn’t quite true, because right here, right now she wanted his kiss.
Was it him she wanted, Naomi briefly wondered, or just contact?
And when she met his eyes the answer was simple.
Him.
Yet even when it was held by his hands she shook her head and he knew that she was thinking about Candice.
‘We broke up.’
‘Abe?’ Naomi wanted to believe him, and to her shame she was so hollowed out with want that she almost didn’t care, yet she needed more if she was to believe him.
‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘I told her yesterday and my father tonight.’
And it was enough clarification, enough that she bent her own rules.
He first kissed her cheek and she closed her eyes at the bliss of contact. His mouth was soft and the room felt very still as he held her so steady. Then she tasted her own tears on his lips as his mouth softly brushed them. It was a kiss that made things better, even if in the morning it might just have made things a whole lot worse.
His tongue slipped in and was met by hers as they toyed with each other. It was a kiss that made her burn and a kiss that somehow soothed. She felt a connection like she never could have envisaged. His scent was faint-inducing, and there was the bergamot, and the wood sage, and now she inhaled a juniper note, and she felt she knew him more now.
His hands left her face but the contact remained as his mouth dizzied her. She felt the cool of the air on her back and it registered that he had pulled down her zip, then she felt the warmth of his palm on her back.
Abe wanted her in bed, yet he made no move to stand because he wanted to kiss her some more.
For Abe, nights necking on a sofa had never happened, let alone were long gone, but he was pulling her dress down over her arms, desperate just to feel her.
‘Abe...’ She wasn’t protesting, but before his kiss toppled her she wanted access to skin and she was pleasingly un-shy and unabashed as he undid her bra, for she was too busy working on the buttons of his shirt.
The crush of him against her chest was delicious. The force of his kiss was denied to her mouth and Naomi closed her eyes as his mouth tasted her breast, wetting and teasing one nipple and then blowing it cold, and when she ached for more of this pleasure he came back to her mouth.
She never let herself get out of hand, but she let him take her to that place now. His kiss pressed her back onto the sofa and the weight of him atop her was sublime.
He looked down at her, and he wanted her stripped beneath him, but he could not resist one more taste so he kissed her again, a deep, sexy kiss as his hips pressed in.
Her hand pushed at his shirt, and finally he shrugged it off, and he felt the dig of her fingers in his back then the flat of her palms exploring him.
It was their second kiss, yet their mouths were adoring each other’s and they were locked in the same urgent tune. He could feel the passion beneath and he pressed in hard. They were a tangle of legs and hot, dirty kisses, and what she lacked in experience was made up for by the instinct that pressed them on.
She felt his hand on her legs, pushing the skirt of her dress up, and she didn’t care—in fact, she wanted the same.
