Guilty Needs(29)

“Eight.”

He took another step back and then made himself turn around before he grabbed her again. He managed to get exactly five feet away before he turned back, took two long strides and reached for her, cupping her face in his hands and kissing her until she moaned into his mouth. He sucked gently, drawing her tongue to him and as she slid it along his lower lip, then inside his mouth. Colby bit—gently. Softly.

Before he could do anything else, he let her go, turned on his heel and stalked away from her.

The next three hours were going to take entirely too long.





Chapter Seven


She looked beautiful in the candlelight, Colby decided.

Beautiful. Shy. Nervous. When she caught him looking at her, she’d bite her lip and look away as though she didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t something he was used to from her, but hell, he hadn’t exactly pictured the two of them in a date situation, or at least not for a good fifteen years. And a date situation for a fifteen-year-old boy was a hell of a lot different than a date situation for a thirty-year-old man.

“I never told you that I had a crush on you in high school, did I?” he asked, out of the blue. The second it left his mouth, he wondered why the hell he’d brought that up but he couldn’t exactly regret it, either. Not once he caught sight of the look on her face.

Her eyes went wide, her jaw dropped open and then she snapped it closed. “You did not.”

Leaning back, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, I did. But you were more interested in basketball practice and doing whatever you used to do with Alyssa. You never noticed me.”

Something odd moved through her eyes and she smiled sadly. “I noticed you. Alyssa just noticed you first.”

He wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but then the waiter appeared. They ordered, both of them going for the New York strip. Bree ordered a rum and coke, but he stuck with ice water. Forcing a smile, he said, “I did a little too much drinking after I took off. Figure it’s better just to not go there again.”

She glanced toward the waiter. “Maybe I…”

“Don’t worry about it. Doesn’t bother me or anything. And I’m not exactly an alcoholic looking to fall off the wagon. I just hit it harder than I should have, and when I realized it, I made myself stop.” Okay, truth doctored a little there. He hadn’t realized it. That was when Alyssa had first starting talking to him, her voice whispering to him in the night, and he’d been convinced it was because he was so damn drunk he was imagining it, or because he losing his grip on reality.

Neither appealed. If he was looking insanity straight the eye, he couldn’t do much about it but he could do something about the drinking. That was exactly what he had done—emptied out every last bit of alcohol he had stashed in the one-room efficiency apartment he rented by the week and he hadn’t had a drop since.

The f*cked-up dreams about Bree had started a few weeks before that and because of them, he’d been drinking even more than normal. Part of him had hoped that, when he quit the drinking, the dreams and the whisper of Alyssa’s voice would stop. Didn’t happen.

“You look serious.”

He glanced up, pulled out of his retrospection and found Bree eyeing him with carefully guarded eyes. “Just thinking.”

He shrugged his brooding thoughts away, studying her from across the table. It was in that moment that he realized she almost always looked guarded—at least when he was around. If he happened upon her and caught her by surprise, it wasn’t there. But as soon as she saw him, the walls went up. He drummed his fingers on his thigh under the table and decided he didn’t like it. The few times he hadn’t seen it had been the day of the funeral, the other day when he’d kissed her and today on her porch.

Unable to stop it, a grin spread across his face, or it might have been more of a leer—hell if he knew. When she saw it, she flushed, her cheeks turning a dusky shade of pink as she squirmed in the seat. “What?” she asked defensively.

“Just thinking—different sort of thoughts this time.” His gaze dropped, following the rosy blush down to her neckline where the deep vee of her blouse blocked his view. Her nipples were hard.

Her blush deepened as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Would you stop?” she asked, exasperated.

“I’m not doing anything,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t exactly true. He made her nervous.

Bree. Of all the women he knew, she was the last one he would have expected to be nervous around him. Was it a new thing? Or just something she’d hidden?

The waiter appeared once again, quiet and fast, placed a rum and coke in front of Bree, then disappeared as quietly as he’d arrived. She grabbed it, took one large gulp, then another. From under her lashes, she watched him.

“What about you?”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean, what about me?”

He shrugged restlessly. “Who did you have some secret crush on in high school? Basketball player? Somebody on the football team?”

She took another sip from her drink and then set it on the table before answering. “High school was fifteen years ago. I barely remember half the kids in my homeroom class.”

“You telling me you don’t remember your biggest crush in high school?”

Rolling her eyes, she said, “What does it matter? It was high school.”