She got up, cleared their dishes, and disappeared inside, leaving him with the precarious happiness he’d allowed himself. “Leave the dishes,” he called after her. “I’ll do them.”
“I should hope so” was her sassy reply, and he liked it. I like her, he thought in this rare moment of clarity—no vengeance, no violence, no bitterness to cloud him. I really like her.
Although like had never ached so much before.
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15
There were practical things to deal with: dishes to wash and lights to turn out, but none of that mattered. How could it matter when George’s life had just shifted so drastically? She tugged Andrew’s hand, brought him up the stairs to her room, to her bed.
He shut the door, which she found sweet, and walked toward her in the dark, dropping the bathrobe as he went. Her husband’s bathrobe—the one that had finally lost his smell. It should have bothered her. It would have on any other man, but not this one, not this man, whose arrival in her life had been brutally unexpected, but whose presence was now so very right.
Andrew’s hands on her face were gentle, his fingers rough against her mouth, his thumb firm on her tongue. She sucked it in, let him paint her lips with her saliva, and shuddered when he closed in with a kiss. She couldn’t see him in the dark, his ink and his scars and the life story he wore like a sordid badge, but she knew him in ways she couldn’t quite fathom. And this kiss, this moment, twisted something inside her.
She let him peel off her clothes, helping him with the buttons on her dress. Her breathing picked up as his hand made its way down her side, curving along her waist and hip, to squeeze her bottom and pull her in against him.
“You got those condoms somewhere close by? Left mine out in the truck.”
“Bedside table,” she said in a rush, and things went fast. On the bed now, with his heavy body sprawled across her, and all she wanted to do was stroke him—like a woman, not a doctor. Straight to those hard, little nipples that had given him away in her office, down over his belly, where she could picture the ink but couldn’t feel it. His shoulders. God they were thick. The heft of them surprised her, affected her in a visceral way.
“Please don’t.” He interrupted her progress, one hand clamped on her wrist.
“Don’t what?”
“Touch me like that.”
“Like wh—”
“All soft and sweet and like you care.”
“But I do ca—” She stopped herself. “Why don’t you want me to touch you?”
“You touch me like that, George, I’m gonna blow in two seconds.”
“Really?”
“Got no idea how close you get me when you touch me like that. Fuck, in your office, even.”
“Really?” she breathed, remembering how there’d been no tenderness on the stairs the night before. Only heat and passion.
“You’re so…soft,” he said.
“I want to make you feel better.”
“Here,” he said, putting her hand on his erection, tight.
“Hang on. You’re afraid tenderness will make you…”
He let out a dry, little half laugh. “Yeah. Freaky, huh? I’ll come too soon if you’re nice to me, but you can jack me as hard as you want. How fucked up is that?”
“I want to touch you.”
“Later. I can’t take it now. Please.”
A quick slide of her palm over his erection brought a grunt to his lips. It lit her on fire.
“You like that?” she asked. Teasing, actually teasing a man for what might have been the first time in her life.
