Awk-Weird (Ice Knights, #2)(54)

“Do you want to talk about what’s gonna happen?” Cole asked.

He could have been talking about the line switch or cupcakes or a million other things, but he wasn’t, and they both knew it.

“What’s there to say?” She rose up on her tiptoes so her lips were nearly pressed to his. “This is temporary.”

“What if it’s not?”

She didn’t answer because the words “it always is” were almost too sad to say out loud. So instead, she decided to take comfort in the fleeting hope that maybe—just maybe—things would be different this time and kissed him.





Chapter Sixteen


After what went down in Coach’s office, Cole had been absolutely 100 percent sure that the only thing he was going to be thinking about for the rest of the season was hockey. Nothing else would exist. Then he’d walked into his house and seen Tess trying to use logic on Kahn. The sight of her in a Flower Power T-shirt that hung down almost to the hem of her tiny sleep shorts that barely covered her ass had short-circuited Cole’s brain, and his cock had taken advantage.

She was the one sweet spot in his world right now. She wasn’t supposed to be there, he had no plans for her, and yet Tess Gardner was there. He needed her, wanted her, had to have her, not just to block out his shit day but to remind himself that there was more if he just had the balls to go after it.

He wasn’t complaining—not now when she was kissing him like a woman who’d found something she’d never realized she’d lost. He knew the feeling. His life had been planned out, organized, followed a set routine. It had been perfect—at least that’s what he’d thought.

Then he’d seen Tess at Lucy’s wedding answering every damn one of those trivia questions while pretending not to be listening to their game. There was a motherfucking pattern here, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what—or more correctly who—was at the center of it all. Tess always had him veering away from the expected into something so much better.

He glided his hands down to Tess’s full hips, and he pulled her against him, desperate for the feel of her softness against every hard, aching part of himself. Fuck. Touching her was better than anything else, but he needed more and he needed it now. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of those tiny shorts, the ones she probably didn’t realize clung to her ass in a way that fried his brain.

“Can I take these off?” Cole asked, begged, prayed.

Her breath was warm against his ear as she whispered, “You’re not sure?”

“Hell yes, but are you?” His fingertips practically vibrated being so close to her smooth skin, the middle knuckles of his thumbs being the only part of him touching her bare skin.

Looking up at him from beneath her thick lashes, she trailed her fingertips down his arms, her fingers like lightning against his bare skin, until her hands were on top of his. In that breath, the entire universe shrank until it was only him and Tess in this moment that stretched on for eternity; then she lowered her hands past his, sending her shorts down her legs, and time snapped back into motion.

“Yes, I’m very sure,” she said, stepping out of the shorts pooled around her feet. “And if you don’t do something more than just kiss me, I’m going to have to take care of it myself.”

His breath hissed out at the image of watching her fingers slip between her legs to circle her clit. “If that’s a threat, it’s a really, really bad one.”

She smiled up at him, a teasing curl of her lips, and he was lost—if he hadn’t been already. This give and take, the sense of unknown possibility of it all, grabbed him by the balls and tugged in the very best of ways.

“Why?” she asked and then whipped off her T-shirt and let it fall to the floor. “Do you want to watch?”

A blast of desire shot through him, hardening every part of him and taking him right to the edge of the breaking point. It wasn’t about want, though; everything centered on his self-control. Could he be this close to her and not touch her, taste her, make her see that something more was happening between them? Could he watch her play with herself, see her face as she got close, look on as her fingers went faster and faster until she came? If that’s what she wanted, he could—he would.

When it came to Tess, it wasn’t about just getting off for either of them. There was more. And if she wanted to tease him, make him come without even stroking his cock once, then that’s what would happen, because being with her wasn’t routine and he still craved it, craved her, anyway.

“I want everything you’ll allow,” he said, gliding his fingertips upward over the roundness of her hips, the lessening dip of her waist, and to the curve of her tits, brushing his thumbs across the hard peaks of her nipples. “I want anything you’re willing to give.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, something shifting in the air around them. “Why?”

How did he put it into words to say out loud when he could barely manage to do it in his head? It was all too much, too new, too fresh and achy and needy. Why did he want Tess?

“Because being with you is like breathing; I just know I need to.” His gut clenched. Shit. “That came out weird, creepy, stalkerish, but I’m not a word guy and it’s just—”

She interrupted him. “People don’t say things like that to me.”