He kissed her again, all around the dimple, and then finally he softly kissed the dimple square on. She giggled, full of nerves and sensations.
A groan escaped his lips as he pulled away from her, opened his door, and pushed it closed. He walked around to her side and opened the passenger door, then held out his hand to help her step down and out of the truck.
Pressing her gently against the side of the truck, he kissed her temple. “Mabel Joan, I want to kiss you so bad. But I won’t until you’re ready.”
Her voice was steady this time, and her fists balled up his shirt. “Please kiss me.”
He claimed her lips with what felt like rushing hunger. It was everything it had been before, and yet so much more. So much life had happened between them all these years, and their kisses reflected that.
They’d just started to pull apart to breathe when a loud honk sounded behind them. Startling, they laughed, their faces red, their breath ragged.
It was the Duncan boys. Yes, their friend and the town’s mayor, Mack, was a Duncan boy too. But when Silver Plummers said, “The Duncan Boys,” it meant the oldest two, Bridger and Hutch. They were larger than life and usually a bundle of trouble.
“It’s Zane and Mabel!” one of them, Mabel thought maybe Hutch, yelled out the window as they blew past. It was followed by a cat call, and another honk of the horn was short and jaunty this time, as if to say, “You go, you two.”
That’s right.Go us. Finally, finally, finally, Zane and Mabel had broken the curse of their first kiss.
Now if they could get finished with the project for the night and maybe try for kiss number three back at the house, all would be right in the world.
Chapter 15
Kissing Mabel. Zane’s mind struggled to grasp it as they reclined on his sofa, enjoying the fruition of what waiting for sixteen years to kiss again could bring.
Their first kiss when they’d been kids had been powerful…and also awkward, scary, forbidden, and rash.
Now? It was like his whole life had prepared him for this, for being with Mabel as she was coming through her trauma and beginning to trust him.
He thought of the journey. All the long hours becoming a firefighter, getting his degree to add paramedic to his life, then going away to vet school, only to be packing his bags to go home a year later with the one thought in his head being that Mabel was sick and alone.
He’d given up his grant—gifted it to the son of one of the old-timer volunteer firefighters in Silver Plum studying at the same school. Then he’d come home to be by Mabel’s side, but respecting their long-standing belief that they had to keep this wedge between them. He’d continued to work like an ox, and being appointed to Fire Chief was a new dream come true. He liked the responsibility of it and training the new guys, all of them his brothers and sisters.
But when he went home at night to his house, it was Mabel who was in his head, always. Even when they’d grown increasingly apart, achingly, frustratingly separating little by little, resentments and awkwardness and unrequited need always between them.
Now? She was in his arms, and he knew something had happened to free her from the block she’d had.
“Zane,” she whispered, pulling his hand to her lips and kissing each knuckle. The ferocity of their kisses had died down, but there was no less want, no less need. Her slow, sweet kisses were the most glorious kind of torture.
“I wish you could put your retainer in your mouth and say my name again,” Zane said. "I kind of liked that.”
She wailed and dropped his hand to bury her face in her own. “Nooo.”
He reached for her hands and gently pulled them away from her face so he could see her better. Her lips were swollen and pinkish red; her hair was wild. “I’m kidding. I mean, not kidding because I really would enjoy that. But I have to joke some way, somehow, because if I didn’t, I—” He shook his head and growled. “I wouldn’t be able to control myself with you.”
She snuggled up against him and sighed. He felt her smile growing. “I like this. I like us.”
“’Like’ like us?” The memory of that old note in the library reared up, and he wasn’t sure if he’d made a mistake or not by mentioning it.
“Uh-huh. I ‘like’ like us.”
“Me too.”
She sighed and struggled to sit up straighter on the sofa. “I do need to study for the NCLEX.”
“But you’re not going to take it until next year.”
“Next spring, so only a few months away. But I have a study group every week online, and it’s intense. If you miss too many practice questions, you get moved down to another group.”
“That would not be good.” To Mabel, being moved down to a lower level in anything would mean failure.
