Weston
Ishouldnotstillbe thinking about the taste of her mouth.
I should be driving.
That’s what I’m doing, technically. Hands on the wheel. Eyes on the narrow road curling through the mountain dark. Truck pointed toward her cabin while the first hard spits of sleet start tapping against the windshield.
But none of that changes the fact that every part of me is still back there under the eaves of the community hall, with Lexie looking up at me like I’d knocked the whole world sideways with one kiss.
Hell.
I grip the wheel harder.
Beside me, she sits with her coat wrapped around her, cheeks pink from the cold and the dancing and maybe the kiss. Herhair’s gone a little wild around her shoulders. Her mouth looks soft and kissed and dangerous.
I kissed her.
And she kissed me back like she meant it.
The thought punches through me all over again.
I’ve wanted women before. I’m not dead. I’ve had eyes. Had a pulse. But nothing like this. Nothing that felt this immediate. This deep. Like the first second I saw her standing in that cabin doorway, soft and wide-eyed and looking at me like she didn’t know whether to run or let me carry her off, something in me locked into place.
Mine.
I don’t say it because saying it out loud after a few hours would sound unhinged.
Doesn’t make it less true.
Lexie shifts in her seat, stealing a glance at me before looking back out the windshield.
“So.”
My mouth twitches. “So.”
“That was some kiss.”
Understatement of the damn century.
“Yeah,” I say.
She smiles to herself, small and shy and pleased, and it does something violent to my insides.
I have no business liking that expression that much.
No business noticing the shape of her thighs under that green sweater dress. The way it clung just enough to tell a man things he had no right thinking. The soft weight of her in my arms on the dance floor. The sweet, breathless laugh she let out every time I said something that got under her skin.
She’s younger than me by enough years that I should’ve kept my distance.
Should’ve delivered the firewood, kept my mouth shut, and gone on with my life.
Instead, I invited her to a dance, kissed her outside the hall, and now I’m driving her home with a storm moving in over the ridge and every decent intention I had hanging on by a thread.
The sleet turns sharper, clicking against the truck.
Lexie looks up. “Is that bad?”
“Could be.”
