Hold Me Close(59)

“Yes.” Her voice harsh and guttural. She sounds like a stranger. “Oh, please, Heath. Yes. I want to know what he makes you do.”

Heath shakes when she says it. He moves down her body so quickly Effie doesn’t have time to react. No time for protest. Heath pushes his way between her legs, her skirt shoved up to her thighs. He’s going to put his mouth on her down there. Oh, no, that’s not... She’s not ready for that...

Too late, he’s hooked a finger in the leg band of her cotton panties and pulled them to the side. His lips and tongue are hot and wet. She cannot stand how good it feels when he licks her.

Effie had thought she understood sex. Why people do it for reasons other than making babies. She understands it feels good, but this, oh, this is like nothing she thought she could imagine. This is the electric pain of being tickled until you think you’re going to faint from it, but you don’t.

There are words. She hears them. She can taste them. What they are, though, Effie doesn’t know. All she can think about is what’s happening to her, and how much she wants it to keep going on and on, maybe until...oh...yes, there, that...until she can’t breathe or see or hear.

All she can do is feel.

When it’s over, all she can do is lie there, limp and spent. When the bed shifts, she feels him drawing away from her, and Effie reaches into the darkness to snag Heath’s shirt. The dark makes it easier for her to pull him back to her.

His kiss tastes like the sea, somehow, tangy and slick, and he shakes at the stroke of her tongue. Between their bodies, he is still hard. She finds his length with her fingers, exploring, at first uncertain, then bolder at the way he mutters her name.

Effie wants to make Heath feel the way she did. If she can. She’s aware that something in the way boys and girls are built means it’s going to be different, but she has no idea how. Still, she tries. With featherlight touches, she strokes that hardness. At the first slippery wetness, she pauses, uncertain again. Is he...done?

When his hand closes over hers and keeps up the motion she began, Effie realizes he’s not. There is more. The sound of his breathing. The way he thrusts into her grip. The moan of her name.

Then, finally, there it is. Heat and wetness. Not only the taste of the sea but something like the smell of it, too. Briny. It sends a rolling wave of electric tingles all through her again.

She finds his mouth with hers. He pulls her close. They stay that way until her hand is cramped and they both begin to shiver from the cold this time.

“I love you,” Heath says into her mouth.

Effie thought she knew about sex; now she understands she thought she knew about love and had been wrong about both. She wants to tell him she loves him. It’s what you do, isn’t it, when you’ve both done what they just did? She wants to tell him because it’s the truth, but what stops her is something that is also the truth.

“It’s easy to love someone when you don’t have a choice,” Effie says. “When you’re all they have.”






chapter twenty-seven

Mitchell was a door-holding-open sort of guy. Effie had dated a few of them. It was something in the law of averages or something, wasn’t it? That even in a sea of *s, douchebags and egotistical thunder twats, there had to be a good guy or two among them.

It made her feel funny, though, having to wait for him to get out and walk around the car to open the door for her. She could handle him picking up the check. She could even handle him pausing to always let her go first through any door, and pulling out her chair, but this car door thing...

“It’s very old-fashioned,” she explained to him over a plate of decent pasta with garlic and olive oil. “That’s all.”

Mitchell grinned. “What can I say? My mama raised me right.”

“She did.” Effie returned his grin, which was surprisingly naughty, considering what a gentleman he was claiming to be. “It’s nice. Just...”

“Makes you uncomfortable?”

She nodded after a second, her grin twisting slightly to become a grimace. “I’m sorry...”

“It’s okay. But I like to,” Mitchell said. “In case you think it was a pain in the butt or something. It’s not. I like to do it.”

“It makes me feel helpless,” Effie blurted and immediately wished she hadn’t.

Mitchell looked surprised, then concerned. “I didn’t know that.”

“Forget it.” Effie twirled the pasta on her fork, pressing it into her spoon’s deep bowl. It was an old trick, to make an elaborate show of eating to hide the fact she’d taken no more than a couple bites.

“No. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable with me, Effie. I’m really sorry if anything I did made you feel that way.”

Shit. Now she’d gone and done it. Brought out the white knight in him.

“It’s just a thing I have. It’s...really... I don’t want to talk about it. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Mitchell sat back in his chair with a frown. “Okay.”

She changed the subject, effortlessly, she thought. They ordered dessert. She wanted coffee but sipped a mug of hot tea. She’d demurred about cake, saying she was stuffed.

He hit her with it in the car, the ignition running but still in Park. “You didn’t eat. You said you were full, but you didn’t eat anything.”