If I’d been in the habit of wearing panties, it would definitely have worked on me.
“Awesome,” Kieran said, practically bouncing in place. How was he so enthusiastic? Was it just excitement over getting to experiment some more? Or was there something else going on behind those pretty green eyes?
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been a kind of gay teething ring for other men before—I knew I’d been, if not a lot of people’sfirstman, maybe confirmation that their general feelings applied to more than one guy.
But this was still different.
“Hey, umm… I actually have to run to a personal training session in like three minutes, but I was thinking… picture for the day? The lighting in here’s nice.”
“What did you have in mind?”
Kieran reached across the table and took my hand, arranging it so he was gripping my fingers, thumb sweeping over my knuckles. “Something like this? It’d be sweet.”
My heart leapt into my throat, so yeah, I had to agree that it’d be sweet. Itwassweet, even when I knew it was for other people’s benefit. In some ways, that even made it sweeter.
I fumbled my phone as I went to pick it up off the table, but eventually managed to take a few shots of our hands from a couple of angles, shoving my notebook close enough for the edge of it to be in the shot, then trying the same with Kieran’s tea and my coffee, all the while savoring the touch of his hand against mine.
“You’re getting the hang of this,” Kieran said, glowing with approval.
“Had a good teacher.” I grinned at him. “Guess you’ve gotta go, huh?”
As much as I knew Ihadto get some more work done—especially since I was going to lose a big chunk of Thursday—I didn’t want Kieran to go.
I wanted him to come back to the cabin with me and curl up on the couch, complete with reading glasses, and read the other six books in the series while I worked on number seven. And then he’d read it as I went and tell me he loved it and I’d put down the laptop and we could make out again.
… my fantasies were getting increasingly specific.
“Gotta go,” Kieran agreed, squeezing my hand before he let go. “But it was good to see you.”
“Good to see you, too,” I said, already counting down the hours until tomorrow night.
12
Kieran
I’d heardat least part of what Bianca said to Felix and I couldn’t stop thinking about it as I headed over to meet Avery, the vet, and see about Hemingway—or whatever his real name was.
It wasn’t as if it wasn’ttrue.
Bianca had been right, I had a well-deserved reputation for not being the settling down type.
“Kieran!” Avery enthused as I poked my head inside, standing behind the reception desk with a clipboard he was scribbling on. “Come on through.”
I followed him through to the back, past the mostly-empty double-sided row of dog pens and out to the little cattery, which also only had a couple of residents—a big grey cat perched high on top of what I figured was the cat equivalent of a jungle gym, a little white-and-grey one curled up in a patch of sunlight, and a familiar ball of black fluff.
What did Felix think of me now that he knew I rarely graced the same bed twice, aside from my own? He’dsaidit was fine, that he’d known I wasn’t a virgin, but there was a difference between…
Well, a difference between having been around the block a few times and running a non-stop marathon, to stretch that metaphor to breaking point.
“She’s been wondering where you are,” Avery said.
“She?” I asked, eyebrow raised.
“You… ofallpeople don’t know a girl when you see one?” Avery asked, laughter in his eyes.
That… was fair.
Did it really matter that I was in the habit of sleeping around? This was a temporary thing, anyway, right? If I even went through with it, which I hadn’t decided I was going to.
