By the Book (Meant to Be #2)(71)

Izzy raised her eyebrows at him. “Do you go hiking around here a lot?”

He nodded. “Oh yeah, I’ve gone like…” He lifted a finger, and then a second, like he was counting. “Absolutely zero times in the past year.”

Izzy burst out laughing. “Then why—”

“Look,” he said. “I was trying to come up with some sort of date-like thing that wasn’t just you and me sitting on the couch in the TV room eating dinner! Because as much as I love that—and I do, don’t get me wrong—I thought maybe today we could do something different.”

Oh. That was really…sweet.

He stared down at the waffle iron, and her smile got wider. Was he embarrassed? Maybe she wasn’t the only one who had felt a little uncertain today.

“What about this?” Izzy said, when Beau sat down across from her with his plate. “Maybe after we write this morning, we can hang out by the pool this afternoon? I have to get some reading done, anyway.”

He smiled. “That’s a great idea. And what if we went out to dinner tonight?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You mean, eat dinner across from each other at a table, instead of on a couch?” She smiled. “That sounds great.”

Izzy took their plates to the dishwasher when they were done.

“Let me run upstairs and get my stuff and I’ll meet you in the library.”

Five minutes later, Izzy walked into the library, but she didn’t see Beau at the table. She jumped when she heard his voice. She turned and saw him, leaning against the door. Waiting for her.

“What took you so long?” He took one step and pulled her against him.

“I had to find my charger,” she said as he moved his mouth closer and closer to hers. “I didn’t bring it with me yesterday, so my laptop battery is fading.”

“Mmm.” His lips were almost against hers as he talked. She closed her eyes and listened to the rumble of his voice. “I suppose that’s an acceptable excuse. But I’m going to need to do this before we sit down to work.”

Then his lips were on hers, and her hands were in his hair, and his hands on her back pressed her closer to him, and her whole body strained toward his. They’d just kissed in the kitchen, but that time it had been different, a little tentative on both of their parts, more of an Are-we-actually-doing-this?-Yes-we-are, morning-after-the-first-kiss kind of kiss. This kiss was enthusiastic, assured, confident. It was all she could do to stay standing. His lips on her skin made her forget everything, want everything.

Beau slid his hands up underneath her tank top and spread his fingers across the small of her back. God, the way he touched her made her shiver. He made her feel like he valued every single inch of her, like every second he spent touching her, kissing her, mattered to him. She wanted to ignore the laptop in the bag hanging off her shoulder, ignore his book, the whole reason she was here, and stand here and kiss him forever.

She forced herself to take a step back. “Beau Towers. We have work to do.”

He took a step toward her and reached for her again. “Mmm, I know,” he said. “We’ve barely gotten started. I need to know if you like being kissed here…” He kissed her under her ear. “And here…” He kissed her collarbone. “And here…”

Izzy put her finger on his lips. “Okay, you’ve forced me into this. There’s a new rule: No kissing in the library.” He shook his head, but she kept talking. “Actually: No touching in the library.” She dropped her finger and stepped away from him.

He glared at her. “No touching? At all? This is cruel!”

She walked over to the table and sat down at her seat. “You left me no choice. This room is for working. We have the whole rest of the house for kissing.”

She thought about that. How it would feel to kiss him all over the house. In the living room, on one of those big, long couches. In the kitchen again, up against the refrigerator, where they’d almost kissed before. In her bedroom…

She looked up at him, and she could tell he was thinking about that, too.

“Well, I’ve never been so inspired to get my work done for the day,” he said, and sat down.

She pushed his notebook across the table at him, and he flipped it open to the first empty page.

“Okay, setting the timer now.” She opened her laptop.

At first, it was hard to concentrate. She’d write a sentence or two, then glance up at Beau to see if he was writing or looking at her, and then look back down. But after a few minutes, she forced herself to pretend he wasn’t there. It only sort of worked, but after a while, she got deep into this thing she was writing. This thing she’d been too scared to call a book, because the last time she’d done that, it had led to heartbreak. But after the past few weeks of working on it, of thinking about it, it was becoming real to her. Now she could see the characters, the story, the shape of the rest of it. The rest of the book.

When the timer went off, she typed in a flurry for about thirty more seconds and then took her hands off the keyboard. She looked up to find Beau smiling at her.

“You don’t have to stop on my account, you can keep going,” he said.

She shook her head as she saved, then closed her laptop.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s good for me to end sort of in the middle of something. It makes it easier for me to pick it back up the next time. If I start at the beginning of a scene, it takes me so long to get back in the flow of things.”