“You’re beautiful,” he whispered, and pulled her sweater over her head.
Jenna smiled and reached for the button on his jeans. Their clothes seemed to fly off with no prompting at all, a shoe here, a belt there, a random jumble of cotton and leather and satin sailing through cinnamon-tinged air. Adam gave a brief thought to the apple pie warming in the toaster oven, and decided he didn’t care about any of it. Let the goddamn kitchen burn. He just wanted her.
Somewhere in the haze of his brain, he had the good sense to fumble for the condom he’d stashed in the nightstand two weeks ago. It had been a fleeting thought, a far-flung hope that Jenna might come back to him like this.
But he’d never imagined it like this. She was hungry and wild and burning with an urgent heat he’d never seen in her before. In any woman.
She arched beneath him as he slid into her, and he watched her eyes go wide.
“Adam.”
She gasped his name like it was the only one she’d ever said before. The only one that mattered.
In that moment, he felt sure it was. He started to move, thrusting inside her soft heat. The vise of her sex welcomed him, clenched him, making him dizzy and frantic. Eyes locked with hers, he drove into her harder, watching her build to a frenzy.
“Oh!” She gasped as her thighs clenched around him. “Adam, I?—”
“I know.” He was right there with her, fighting for control and losing the battle.
The first time they’d done this, it felt magical. But this time was so far beyond that. Pleasure and heat and fondness and respect and desire tangled together in his mind, his body, his heart.
When she cried out and arched tight beneath him, he let go of it all and slammed into her body like he owned her. Like he couldn’t imagine being without her for even the space of a breath.
As he shuddered and came deep inside her he abandoned his fears and his worries. He let go of everything—sanity, reason, uncertainty, doubt.
The only thing left was Jenna.
Afterward, they lay sweaty and satiated in a tangled mass of sheets and limbs. Jenna turned to look at him, admiring the stubbled line of his jaw, the faint dusting of curls on his chest. He was beautiful, if that was the right adjective to use for a man.
Adam rolled toward her and propped himself on one arm. He slid a possessive hand over her hip and planted a kiss on her forehead. “Planning your escape strategy?”
“What?”
“Just wondering if you’re going to freak out like last time and run from the room like you’re being pursued by a herd of rabid lemurs.”
She smiled and shook her head. “Last time was different. I was late for breakfast with your ex-wife. Not that I knew at the time she was your ex-wife. Not that?—”
He slid a hand from her hip to her bottom and gave a light squeeze, forcing Jenna to abandon that train of thought.
“Stop that,” he said. “No talk of exes right now. No regrets. No what-ifs. No fretting about what’s going to happen or what happened before or what might have happened in some alternate universe if we’d met in third grade and shared an ice cream cone and lived happily ever after. Just be here in this moment. Savor the afterglow for a minute.”
“I’d be savoring it more if I had apple pie.” She grinned and vaulted out of bed. She walked slowly toward the kitchenette, trying not to think about whether her thighs jiggled or if it was unseemly to eat dessert naked in bed with a man she’d only known a few weeks.
She pulled open the toaster oven, relieved to see the pie hadn’t burned to a crisp. It felt like they’d made love for hours, but the practical side of her felt relieved that was only how it worked in romance novels. In real life, it was just enough time to warm a couple pieces of pie.
“You’re thinking again,” Adam said behind her.
“What?”
“Your shoulders get tense when you’re thinking.”
She smiled as she shoveled the pie onto two plates, then grabbed a pair of forks and returned to the bed. She tried not to bounce as she sat down beside him, dragging a pillow over so she could prop her plate on something besides Adam’s bare chest.
Now there’s a thought . . .
He rolled over and grabbed the second plate, picking up his fork and giving her bare knee a soft poke before using the utensil to stab into his pie.
Jenna laughed and wriggled away, forking up a piece of her own pie. “I was thinking, you’re right.” She took a bite and chewed. “This was amazing, obviously.”
