He bent to lay the paperback open and face down on the coffee table, and I threw my hands out to stop him while a pained cry choked its way out of my throat. Hurting a book’s spine was one of my worst nightmares come true. He paused to look at me with an evil spark in his eyes, then with a slow smile curling his mouth, he brought his fingers to the corner of the page where he’d stopped reading.
“Gah! No!” I shot forward and wound my hands around his before he could bend it inward. “Back away from the book or you’re going to make me hemorrhage.”
He laughed, and the warm, rumbling sound brightened the room as much as the afternoon sun. “I’m just messing with you. See? I didn’t even lose your spot in the book.”
He was right. My bookmark was safely tucked away at where I’d stopped reading, but at that moment, my focus centered on every part of our hands that touched. Shockwaves exploded until I took the book away from him, my finger bookmarking his spot. My skin sizzling hot, I looked around for something else to mark his place.
Sam handed me a phone bill. “That’s what bills are for, right?”
“That’s the only thing they’re good for,” I said and settled the bill into his spot in the book with a smile. Hemorrhage thwarted.
“So,” Sam said and cleared his throat. “Do you like pizza with your bacon?”
“I’m guessing I don’t have a choice.” This boy and his bacon.
“No, not really,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. “I’ll call. You keep watching.” He thundered up the stairs, I guessed in search of his phone.
I tried to focus on the ending of the show, but thoughts of Sam’s attention on my lips made it difficult to concentrate. Was he as attentive to the other parts of my body, too? Signs pointed to yes, especially yesterday at the library and last night when my nipples had poked through my wine-soaked T-shirt. He had to have noticed them aiming right at him like a double-breasted shotgun. Kind of hardnotto notice. So did he think about my body parts often? Did he wonder what they would feel like pressed against his?
Liquid heat puddled to my center. Squirming, I drew in a ragged breath and forced the thoughts away. A dirty kind of shame settled into my gut because I couldn’t think about him that way. Before he grew into a hot, half-naked man, he was like a little brother who’d draw pictures of mustached men, hold them in front of his face, and say, “Does this make you happy?” in a high-pitched voice. It invariably sent me into hysterical giggles. Geez, what was with my childhood and mustaches? Somehow it must’ve paved the way for my panties to dissolve around men who sported stubble. Or at least a certain man.
And he was three years younger than me, and chances were he hadn’t quite matured past boy-in-a-candy-store mentality that seemed typical for his age. Plus, why would he want to when he looked like that? He could have anyone, anywhere, anytime. So what was he doing wasting his Sunday afternoon with a slightly neurotic librarian who may or may not have a fetish with facial hair and couldn’t make a simple phone call to Her Number?
Sam’s footsteps rumbled down the stairs, and to my despair, he’d put on a white T-shirt.
I tried to empty my expression of all disappointment while I pointed at the new addition to his ensemble. “Were you cold?”
“Hot, actually.”
Understatement of the decade.
He gave a secret smile, one I had no idea how to read, and gestured in the direction of the front door. “I didn’t want to scare off the delivery guy.”
“Or delivery girl. Equal opportunity, right?” I said, remembering our conversation from last night.
“Yeah.” He sat next to me, closer this time, so close the back of his thigh crushed my feet, but I hardly noticed. The ends of his hair, now dry, fell across his jaw. His gaze locked on mine, he pushed the silky strands that lay against his full mouth off his face, much like mine had earlier. But that move could never look as sexy on me as it did on him.
“Hey, any word from Riley?” I asked to alter my focus on anything but Sam. I hadn’t seen Riley since I arrived yesterday.
Sam’s lips parted as if he was going to say something, then he seemed to change his mind. “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
“Okay.” Once again, I wondered what had changed between them. When we were younger, they acted like brothers, teasing and annoying each other, but they never acted hatefully toward one another. I pickedHeist My Heartup from the coffee table and set it on his knee, hoping he would pick it up again just so I could watch him read because I was so easily entertained. “Riley called that book porn, by the way.”
Sam’s mouth slid into a salacious smile that curled my toes. “Book porn?”
“That’s what he called it,” I said, nodding.
He rolled his eyes, the smile vanishing. “Riley can shove it up his ass.”
“No. No, he can’t. No books up anyone’s asses. Ever.” I placed my palm over the book’s cover, my fingers brushing his thigh. “Especially that one because you and I are both reading it.”
He took the book and my hand in his and held me there while he leaned toward me, closer and closer until his mouth was just a breath away. “Deal,” he said, and the word sighed over my face like a divine whisper.
Images of other possible deals we could make tumbled through my head, but the ones involving naked flesh and lips and no-strings sex burned the hottest and rose up above the rest.
“Sam...” I said, and there was a hint of a question mark in my tone, as if my desire dared me to ask what perched on my tongue:Will you fuck my brains out?
“Yes,” he said in a husky voice.
