The Reunion(62)

“Am I getting you excited?” she asks, her fingers trailing back up to my pecs.

I reach out and place my hand on her hip, spinning her so she’s pressed up against the bathroom counter. I slip my fingers under her shirt and move them up to her ribs. She sucks in a harsh breath, and I chuckle. “Are you getting excited?”

Eyes wide, she wets her lips. “Touché.” She removes her hand and places it on the counter behind her.

“So, we agree that there will be no touching unless you want this towel ripped off.”

She glances down at the towel and then back up at me. “I don’t think I thought this through.”

“You didn’t.”

“How was I supposed to know you were going to be walking in here like Thor?”

“Thor?” I raise a brow. “That’s quite a comparison.”

“Well . . .” She motions to my body. “Seriously, Cooper. When . . . how?”

I chuckle and release her from my grip. Taking her hand in mine, I lead her out of the bathroom and down the hall to her kitchen. “After our one-night stand, I felt a bit out of control. Like I had no grip on my life. I needed to focus on something, so I focused on my health. Simple as that.”

“More like obsessed,” she mutters. “You’re like a Transformation Tuesday on steroids.”

“Except this is a steroid-free body.”

“Of course.” She gives me another once-over. “I was going to make a frozen pizza, but now I’m afraid you only eat lettuce, and I don’t have any of that.”

“Pizza is fine.” I smirk and walk over to her freezer, where I find four frozen pizzas. “Stock up?”

She reaches past me and grabs one. “Late nights lead to not being in the mood to cook for myself. And, you know, since I’m single and all, I have no one to welcome me home and cook dinner for me.”

“Is that an invitation?” I ask, feeling more confident after her appreciation of my body.

“That’s a statement—take it as you wish.”

While she preheats the oven, I ask, “When do you usually get off work?”

“Depends on the day and how many orders we have. I usually stay later to clean up the kitchen so my employees can go home and have a normal life.”

“That’s nice of you.”

She plops the pizza on a pan and puts it in the oven. “I remember when my parents used to call it a day and just leave all the dishes and pans for everyone else to clean. I’d get so mad. I know they owned the shop, but it wouldn’t have killed them to stay back every once in a while.” She walks over to me and takes my hand, guiding me over to the couch. “I told myself that when I took over the shop, things were going to be different, and guess what? I don’t even have to ask for help now. The employees offer because they see that I’m putting in the work too. But I’ll always be the one who stays late.”

We take a seat on the couch, and I adjust my towel so I’m covered up while she sits down, putting a few inches between us. Her arm drapes behind me on the couch, and her finger starts to draw a small circle on the back of my neck.

“I thought we weren’t touching,” I say, even though what she’s doing feels amazing.

Her finger stops. “This is getting you excited?”

“Nora, any part of you touching me is going to get me excited. Keep that in mind.”

“Oh.” Her cheeks flush as she removes her fingers. “My mistake. So maybe I’ll just keep my hands to myself.”

“Might be best,” I say as I glance down to her chest and catch her hardened nipples pressing against her silk top.

Jesus.

This is going to be a long freaking night. I’m still a little confused as to why I’m here. As to why I can’t seem to keep my distance ever since I walked into her shop to order a damn cake.

Something about Nora is more addictive than I thought. After our one-night stand—even though I hate calling it that—I didn’t give myself a second to think about what we’d done. I just chastised myself for having sex with her, given who her best friend is, and tried to forget about it. But now that I’ve faced what we did—and even though there’s still guilt, I realized that in the grand scheme of things, I didn’t do anything wrong—I can’t seem to stop myself from thinking about it, or from gravitating toward her.

“So, tell me how the party planning is going.”

“Disastrous.” I blow out a harsh breath. “The Chance siblings had a huge blowout yesterday in the midst of party planning.”

“What do you mean by ‘blowout’?”

“Oh, you know, pointing out what’s wrong with each other, why we don’t get along—classic sibling things.”

She winces. “Sounds painful.”

“It was.” Even though I said no touching, I gently lift a lock of her wet hair and twist it around my finger. “It was less than ideal to hear about how my brother thinks I fail at everything and for my sister to tell me I don’t care about anything but myself.”

“She said that?”

“In a roundabout way. Honestly, it was as if we took each other’s flaws, elevated them, and threw them in each other’s faces.”

“Why would you do that?”