My hands, acting with a will of their own, slid from her shoulders to her waist, pulling her closer, crushing the air from my lungs, eliminating the last vestiges of spacebetween us. The kiss deepened, shifted to something shared, something hungry, that spoke of pent-up tension and a loneliness I hadn’t realized I carried until this very moment. It was messy, a collision of frustration and surprise and an undeniable spark that had been simmering beneath the surface of our awkward, pastry-fueled interactions.
There was only the surprising softness of her lips under the initial force, the way she tasted, the feel of her body, slight and trembling but fiercely present, molding against mine as if she belonged there. The thought was a jolt, as shocking as the kiss itself.
Raw, unthinking instinct took over. I parted my lips in both a silent question and a demand. She answered, a soft sigh escaping her as she welcomed my tongue. The kiss transformed into a hot, wet, searching exploration, a raw claiming. No finesse, no practiced seduction, just a desperate, mutual need.
I slanted my mouth over hers, finding a better angle, a groan tearing from my throat. She met me stroke for stroke, her initial desperation fanned into answering heat. Both of her small hands were now tangled in my hair, her fingers tightening, pulling me impossibly closer.
I pressed myself against her, backing her up a step until her spine met the rough clapboard of the house. Fierce arousal, a white-hot flame I hadn’t experienced in longer than I cared to admit, flared to life, coiling tight and low in my gut, hardening me against her. There was no thought, no room for the usual litany of warnings that usually governed my interactions.
Only the surprising, explosive rightness of her mouth on mine.
I couldn’t stop. Didn’t want to.
All the irritation, the annoyance, the walls I’dconstructed since the accident, brick by painful brick—they were just gone. Incinerated in this unexpected, bewildering, overwhelming clash of mouths.
Just as suddenly as it began, as the fire threatened to rage out of control, it ended.
We broke apart, or perhaps stumbled back from each other, breathless, chests heaving. I stared down at her, my hands still loosely on her waist. A fine tremor ran through her, or maybe it was me who was shaking. Her eyes were wide, dazed, her lips swollen and damp from my kiss, a vulnerable pink against the tear-streaked grime on her face. The remnants of her earlier despair were still there, but now mingled with a look of shell-shocked surprise that surely mirrored my own.
This was a mistake. A colossal, Category Five, no-good-can-come-of-this, what-in-the-hell-am-I-doing mistake.
Because for one breathless moment, holding her, tasting her, I had felt something other than the dull ache of the past. That feeling sent a bolt of pure, cold terror through me. It was a taste of something I could lose. A sensation like a target painted on my back, just waiting for the universe to take its shot. Again.
The sounds of Dove Key rushed back in—the distant drone of a boat engine out on the Gulf, the insistent cry of a gull circling overhead, the gentle, indifferent rustle of palm fronds in the breeze. The heat of the sun was oppressive again, pressing down on us.
What. The. Hell. Just. Happened?
I couldn’t form a coherent thought, let alone a sentence. I just stared at her, this bewildering, infuriating, undeniably passionate woman. She stared back, the air between us charged with the frightening, electrifying weight of what we’d just done.
Chapter Eleven
IRIS
The tilted worldslowly and grudgingly righted itself. Or maybe that was just me, swaying on unsteady feet. The air, thick and molten only moments ago with the intensity of…whoa… was now frail and sharp in my lungs. I could hear my ragged breathing beside the frantic thrum of my pulse in my ears.
And Austin.
He stood less than an arm’s length away, his chest rising and falling like a bellows. A loud bellows. His usually unreadable gray eyes were fixed on mine with an expression of shock, and his lips were a darker shade than usual. A muscle twitched in his jaw, a tiny, betraying sign of the storm I suspected was raging behind his stunned facade.
Oh. My. Stars.
What had I just done?
I, Iris Holloway, the woman currently engaged in a one-woman pursuit of B&B proprietorship, had just launched a full-scale, lips-first assault on my grumpy,intensely private sea-captain neighbor. After unleashing a rather un-G-rated tirade. Also after he’d saved me from almost certain bodily harm involving a large piece of siding and a terribly rickety ladder.
My cheeks, already flushed from exertion and tears, burned with a fresh, even hotter wave of mortification. My lips tingled, a phantom sensation of the surprising softness beneath the initial desperate force. At the unexpected taste of him—salt, sunshine, and something uniquely, unforgettably Austin.
And the most shocking part? The part that made my stomach perform a series of complicated, dizzying acrobatic maneuvers that had nothing to do with nearly falling off a ladder? A tiny, rebellious part of me, the part that had apparently been hibernating under layers of good intentions and silly expletives, wasn’t sorry.
Not one single, solitary bit.
Austin, however, looked like he was one twitching synapse away from either bolting for the nearest horizon or spontaneously combusting into a pile of bewildered ash. The alarming flush that had risen from his collar to his hairline was receding, leaving him pale beneath his tan, his usual stoic mask shattered.
He looked… floored.
Like a complex navigation chart had just been rewritten in ancient Aramaic right before his eyes and then set on fire. For a man usually so in control, so self-contained, it was almost endearing. And also rather unsettling.
The thick silence stretched, vibrating with unspoken questions and the crackling static of a line just crossed. One of us needed to say something. Break the spell. Or the horrified paralysis.
