AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Everything except my cock.
Which should be damn thankful as soon as she about-faces on that lusty little expression. But as soon as she shutters her submissive moment, I’m that much harder. That much more driven to figure out her reticence—and then unravel it.
But not now.
Not when our flirting has already eaten into the time I have left before Kaz’s pound at the front door.
“Okay, seriously…Mr. Z.” She’s positioned all the way back up now, proving that someone instilled her with the importance of good posture somewhere along the way. And then there’s the renewed formality, though not by sacrificing that beautiful concern in her eyes. “You look like you’re prepping to scale Everest with a bindle and three protein bars. What really gives here?”
Now I do laugh. With zero mirth. “Everest,” I echo, as more words whisper their desperate echoes in my mind.
Another way.
What if that’s really not possible in the next two hours?
What if it’s like facing an excursion up Everest—impossible without dogged preparation? The right clothing, equipment, sustenance? Maps, guides, gauges?
And time.
I need more fucking time.
Not just to figure out what to do with Kaz. To disseminate what this is, with a woman possessing DNA that should make me hate her.
Ohhh, I do not hate her.
Then damn it, what is all this? The instant attraction of this afternoon is just a drop in our ocean now, getting fed by new floods of awareness by the hour. At times by the minute.
As in this one now.
The sixty seconds that goes by like a whole lifetime, in which I’m pulled across to her once more. In which I lower next to her, facing fully toward her, and reach for one of her hands. In which our gazes mesh like the connection of our touch, but I see so many stories about her that I still don’t know. That I crave to soak in until they’re part of me too.
Stories that will take her trust.
Trust that will take time.
Time we’ll have to steal.
I know a way to do it. What I don’t know, and refuse to force, is Quinn’s commitment to it. To…us. If there’s even that to go on right now.
“What?” she prompts, leaning over like she’s trying to decipher my stories too. “You want to go a round of trivia about it or something? Did you know the correct pronunciation is eve-rest and not ever-est? That its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, means ‘Goddess of the Valley’? And that it grows a few millimeters every year because of tectonic action under the earth?”
I twist to get closer to her. It doesn’t feel near enough. I’m fascinated by the new lights, lush and silverish, dancing in the depths of her indigos. “Let me guess. You puttered with a song about that too?”
“Uh-uh.” She smirks as I cup her face. “I’m just obsessed with Tibet.”
“So you’ve been there too?”
“Never. But it’s on the bucket board.”
“The bucket what?”
“Combination bucket list and vision board. Just so I have it all covered.”
I glide my hand to her nape, using the pause to absorb her statement. Words issued like idle chat, but not really that. Not at all. So many stories…
“Okay,” she intones into my silence. “What is it now, lasagna?”
A new twinkle in her gaze says she was tempted to throw out a fresh buddy, but I’m glad she’s gone for the epicurean endearment instead, It gives me room to shake my head, staying serious for the few extra moments I can allow before really yanking her into a conversational—and situational—one-eighty.
