Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(102)

“Or maybe you should wait on that.” He stayed her hand.

So she touched his chest and stomach instead, running her small, cool palms over him until the touch heated up and felt nearly as dangerously hot as the jerk of her fist.

“There’s a condom in my bag,” she said, and there was—a whole box of them, in a plastic drugstore bag. Holy shit, she’d been thinking of this the whole time she was headed his way. He tore the packet open and rolled it on. He was at that poised-on-the-edge place where even putting the condom on felt like too much, until he’d rolled it all the way down and the added tightness at the base of his cock calmed things down a tiny bit. He picked her up and backed her into the door, lowering her slowly until he could feel her liquid heat on the head of his cock. He could feel her dripping, running down his cock, even through the latex, which made him stupidly desperate and not quite as gentle as he meant to be when he thrust into her.

She didn’t seem to care. She yelled his name when he filled her and several times as he withdrew and reseated. Her breasts moved against his chest, the nipples hard points that gave him something to think about other than the lunatic pressure building in his groin, and he tweaked both nipples and watched her face as she came, her mouth open in a silent cry, her face flushed, her head thrown back. When she lost control of her silence and made a harsh, stuttered “Aaaah” sound in the back of her throat, he came like a f*cking avalanche.

When he regained full use of his brain and limbs, he was kneeling on the floor with her resting on his thighs, and he was still buried in her. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten from standing to kneeling.

“We are going to have to extend the Richter scale to twenty,” she said.

*

Miles laughed, and Nora felt the hard muscles under her thighs, his sculpted biceps under her hands, vibrate with the motion. His body was like some kind of Renaissance sculpture, all clean, smooth, living marble. She had time now to appreciate, to trace the line of his shoulder to the well-muscled cap, to stroke a hand down over his pecs, the male curves and angles of his torso—not too bodybuilder-processed, with real-human-being slight ridges on his flat belly—to where the trail of coarse hair disappeared between their bodies. She sighed her happiness.

“It wasn’t anything like that with Henry.”

Possibly that wasn’t the sort of thing she should say. Probably she should have kept her mouth shut. But her orgasm had taken her inhibitions with it, and she mostly wanted to crawl inside him and have him know everything that was in her head. How much she loved his house, at least what she could see of it from the front hall—a wood stove in the room to the right, a wall of leaded-glass windows to their left, the kind of old-fashioned radiator that clanked at night, behind an elaborate screen of lacy patterned metal. The kinds of details people had once cared about.

She wanted to tell him how scared she had been, on the cab ride from the Cleveland airport to his house, that she was deluding herself. How she’d relived over and over the terrible fantasy that she would arrive to discover he had a secret life, one with no room for her, that all the talk about dates and getting together and how in-person would be so much better had been whistling in the wind.

She wanted to confess, in a no-holding-back deluge of words, how much she liked him. Her taste buds, the little hairs that rose on the back of her neck, her freckles, liked him.

She could have told him any one of those things, but instead what had popped out of her mouth was the kind of comparison she knew you weren’t supposed to make, even favorably.

“Who’s Henry?”

“Henry’s the man I was on the rebound from on New Year’s Eve.”

He listened alertly, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder because it was easier to talk without him watching her so closely. “Henry messed me up. We’d been together three years, and I had this elaborate fantasy about how he was going to propose to me on Christmas. Or New Year’s Eve, maybe?”

He touched her hair, the part where it lay raggedly against the nape of her neck. Stroked his fingers through it, a soothing repetition.

“And, God, maybe he would have, who knows, but then I read an email he’d written to the other woman he was sleeping with. He’d been sleeping with her for nine months.”

“Jesus.”

“I know, right? Anyway, at that party, I guess I was saying ‘f*ck you’ to Henry.” He was quiet.

She lifted her head. His gaze wouldn’t quite meet hers. “Wait, no, that came out wrong. That’s how it started, as a f*ck-you to Henry. But that’s—I—”

“Hey. I’m happy to have been the lucky beneficiary of the f*ck-you party for Henry.” He pushed her spiky bangs off her forehead, the pad of his thumb moving gently across her skin, starting a line of heat there that connected to other vital parts of her. “He didn’t deserve you, you know. I hope you know that. I hope I’m stating the painfully obvious.”

She sighed. “In my better moments, I do know that.”

“I will do my best to remind you of it, often.”

“Often.” A word that suggested time stretching before them, a relationship, all kinds of possibility. She felt full of emotions, like things too close to bubbling over on the stove. She touched his face, rough with dark stubble. His eyes were not quite as sad as they’d been on New Year’s Eve, but she thought it would still be fair to describe them as haunted.