“Yeah?”
“Right after you helped me down from the attic, you said something like... ‘better put this in the be careful what you wish for category.’”
“Yeah?”
“What did you wish for?”
“Oh,” he said easily. “I wished to know what it was like to have your legs wrapped around me.”
It was as if she’d just bolted whiskey distilled from Lust.
She would not have trusted herself to stand just then. She would have wobbled like a dreidel.
She cleared her throat.
She gestured to his Yogi Bear glass. “Ah. Can I get you another glass of—”
He leaned over and kissed her.
It was as unhurried yet as deliberate as if she’d just asked him to pass the hummus. And she supposed she’d had time to dodge if she wanted to. His mouth landed unerringly on hers, warm and soft, then warm and firm and a little more demanding. He delicately teased the ever-so-slightly parted seam of her lips with his tongue in a way that relit little fuses all over her body. Ones she never even suspected had gone out. Others she never even suspected she’d possessed. And in seconds it seemed her core temperature had ramped to about a thousand degrees and her bones were well on their way to melting.
It was over in a few seconds.
She opened her eyes a few seconds after that.
Surprised to realize she’d closed them.
Interesting. She was pretty positive the room hadn’t been turning around in circles before she’d closed them.
Last night’s kiss was child’s play compared to what had just happened.
Mac sat back, as if to admire his handiwork.
But not all the way back.
She could feel his breath on her chin. She was hypnotized by the rise and fall of his chest.
They stared at each other, and he looked just as hazy-eyed and astounded as she felt.
“Ihadto,” he explained, sounding genuinely befuddled. “It’s just... you were just... and your eyes were... and I just...”
He kissed her again.
And when he did, her hand rose to guide his face in, and her arm looped around the back of his warm neck and the low moan that had been building escaped. She shifted to fit right up against and underneath him as he levered over her, as synchronized as if they were onDancing with the Stars.
Then again, she supposed she had practiced that move or something like it before, quite a bit: in her mind, with her pillow, in the dark, when she was a teenager.
It was almost funny how take-charge and matter-of-fact he was. His competence and confidence were erotic as all get-out and were somehow so convincing she couldn’t come up with a single reason not to reach for Mac Coltrane’s zipper while he was sliding his tongue down her neck... right down to the little tender place where it joined her shoulders... where he nipped so, so softly. Little bolts of lightning shot through her veins, lit her up with pleasure.
He kept one hand cradled around the back of her head and the other slipped beneath her dress and he quite sneakily and deftly hooked a few fingers in the waistband of her underwear. And as smoothly and subtly as he might have slipped a maître d’ a fifty for the best table in a fancy restaurant, he slid them all the way down her thighs and calves. She gave her feet a little flick to shed them completely.
It was starting to feel a bit like the equivalent of jumping Whiskey Creek on her bike, or off Devil’s Leap for the first time. But she was already midair andeveryoneknew there was no turning back once you got that far.
And as his hand slid casually around to her bare hip and rested there—no doubt he had interesting plans for it and that was just the starting gate—there were still layers and layers of pleasure to be had from this kiss, and dear God the way he kissed—sensual, carnal, with a tenderness underlying the hunger so unexpected, and yet so exactly how she remembered him... it about did her in. And then his hand was skimming up and up and up and she took her lips away from his as her head went back hard and her breath hissed in when his fingers slipped between her legs and slid against her, hard. He did it again.
“Mac... I want...”
And with more of that seamless dexterity he maneuvered her pretty quickly onto his lap. He was an engineer, after all.
