Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(97)

“A favorite restaurant, then.”

She had to think about it. There were so many good ones. It wasn’t a lot easier than picking her favorite city. “Wild Ginger in Seattle.”

“Is that Thai?”

“Pan-Asian, technically, I think. What about you? Do you have a favorite?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Sally’s Apizza in New Haven, Connecticut. It’s this little hole in the wall that hasn’t changed in fifty years, but it has the best clam pizza on earth. I’m not exaggerating. We’ll go there sometime.”

“Did you just ask me on a date?”

“Uh-huh. I did.” She could hear the smile in his voice.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m looking up flights right now.”

“You are not.”

“I am. I can meet you there in—okay, wait a second. Damn. The ticket is five hundred dollars.”

“That’s a little pricey.”

“Okay, yeah, not in the budget. But sometime. Sometime I’m taking you to Sally’s.”

She let it feel like a promise, lodged warm and snug in her chest.

During their fourth conversation, he asked her to send him some photos of herself. He sent her some of himself. He was grinning in most of them.

“You smile a lot.”

“I guess I used to,” he said.

“Are you more serious now for some reason?”

“I guess I am.”

She hesitated, on the edge of asking him why. She felt she knew him well, but not that well. Not quite.

“You smile a lot, too,” he said.

“I do.”

“Are you smiling now?”

“Yeah.”

She’d been smiling almost constantly since Owen had found her on Twitter.

“Nora?”

The way he said it made her hopeful. Wary. “What?”

“I wish you were here. Right now.” His voice was all rough edges.

Her face got hot. Her hands, too. Actually, she was hot all over. “I wish I were there, too.”

“Maybe you can act as my proxy. Since I’m not there.”

Breath huffed out of her. She wanted to do this. She wanted to lean back on the couch and slide her hand between her legs, feel the damp heat rising off her body. She wanted to squeeze her thighs together around her hand and ask him what he was wearing and tell him lies about what she was wearing; she wanted to hear his voice rumble against her ear and jaw, the vibrations running out along her nerve endings and jazzing her up.

All the words got stuck behind her tongue and wouldn’t shake loose. Instead, her heart pounded uselessly and she tasted adrenaline.

“Do you follow the advice you give your students? You told me the first time we talked that you tell them they should be in a committed relationship or marriage before they have sex.”

She tried to keep her breath under control, even as heat gathered between her legs. “Not always.”

“Oh, yeah?”

They might have been talking about the circumstances under which she believed it was prudent to carry an umbrella and wear rain boots; his voice was that steady. She wished desperately to see his face.

“I don’t see anything wrong with a little frolicking among consenting adults.”

Oh, God, she sounded like a granny. Or—a sex-ed teacher.

“Was that what we were doing at the party? Frolicking?”

He, on the other hand, had managed to make frolicking sound like a new sex technique, filthy and forbidden. Her nipples tightened. “I think that was foreplay to frolicking.”

“Yeah? If that was foreplay, the actual frolicking might kill me.”

More heat, low and dark in her belly. She leaned back on the couch and slid her palm down and rubbed it experimentally over the seam of her jeans. She was damp and hot there, and her body clenched at the contact. “Is this foreplay, too?”

“Like phone-sex foreplay?”

“Yeah.” She flattened her hand, a slow, easy back and forth, just enough friction to keep the buzz up.

“How do you distinguish foreplay from the main event in phone sex?”

She tried to keep her breathing even. “I don’t know. Good question. I guess the foreplay stops when you start touching yourself.”

“Nora?”

“Uh-huh?”

“The foreplay was over when you said the word ‘foreplay.’ At least on this end of the phone.”

“Um,” she said, because her brain was concerned with single syllables at the moment, like want and now. “Here, too.”

“I warn you, I’m not particularly good at this. Dirty talk.”

“Whatever you’re doing is working for me.” She raised her hips a little to meet the slow I’m-pretending-I’m-not-really-doing-this flirtation of her hand with the crotch of her jeans.

“What are you wearing?”

“Jeans and a short-sleeved T-shirt over a long-sleeved T-shirt.” Silence.

“I killed your libido,” she said.

“No. I was trying too hard to be funny, and my brain got knotted up.”

“What were you going to say, before you started thinking about trying to be funny?”

“ ‘That’s more for me to take off you, then.’ ”