Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(17)
She walked closer, Rake following. She moved to a shaded area under one of the building’s awnings, pressing her back into the cool stone as she licked her ice cream cone.
“God, I’m sweating my tits off,” Lizzie said after a minute, plucking at her sticky T-shirt. While she loved her city, its humid summers did not love her back. She wasn’t made for the heat. Her thighs chafed almost raw within the first week of the season, her pits sweat until at least September, and she lost a layer of skin every time she got up from the sticky plastic subway seats. Lizzie was made for fall, and she spent nine months out of the year wishing for it.
Rake paused with his cone halfway to his mouth, a drop of vanilla ice cream trailing across his knuckles as he looked at her. Like she had two heads.
“What do you do for a living?” he asked at last.
“I’m a baker. Why?”
“Because if that doesn’t work out, you should consider writing children’s books. You have quite the colorful vernacular, Birdy,” Rake said, making her laugh.
“Why do you call me that?” she asked, taking a long lick of her quickly melting treat.
“Call you what?”
“Birdy,” she drawled, mimicking his accent.
A flash of uncertainty crossed his features like the question caught him off guard, but it was replaced with his cool mask of cocky handsomeness. “It was your hair,” he said, ducking down to catch a melted droplet of vanilla.
“My hair?”
“It looked like a bird’s nest the first time I saw you.”
Lizzie rolled her eyes and flipped him off, making him laugh.
“I’m just kidding,” he said, and Lizzie looked at him expectantly. “It’s because your voice sounds like a squawking bird.”
Lizzie’s jaw dropped in indignation as Rake tried to hide his teasing smile behind another lick of his ice cream cone. Without thinking, Lizzie reached out, pushing the cone into his face, smearing ice cream from his nose down to his chin.
He blinked at her for a few beats as her face broke into an evil grin. “Oh, you’ll pay for that one,” he said, dropping his cone and lunging for her.
Lizzie tried to sidestep him, but he caught her easily, cinching his arms around her waist and making her squeal. He pushed his sticky face against her cheek and down her throat while tickling her sides, causing her to squirm and make the mess even worse.
“You’re such an ass,” she screeched between her giggles as he nuzzled deeper into her neck. She tried to push free, her arms weak from her laughter, but he pivoted them, pinning her back against the stone of the building.
He dragged his mouth up from her neck to her chin, the movement straying from playful to intimate. The pleasure centers in Lizzie’s brain lit up like fireworks, causing her to drop her own ice cream and plunge her hungry fingers into his hair, tilt his head so she could seek out his mouth, and press into a deep kiss. Rake returned it, tasting her as if she were the sweetest thing he’d had all day.
“You made quite the mess,” he said, pulling away just long enough to nibble at her bottom lip.
“I like to stay on brand,” she replied, letting one of her hands lazily travel down his body, fingers scraping against his abdomen before lightly resting at his belt buckle. Rake groaned into her mouth and deepened the kiss.
“Take me back to your room,” she said after a few more kisses as her body buzzed with the want for contact and pressure and more.
Without a word, Rake laced his fingers with hers and led them back toward his hotel with quick steps. It wasn’t long until they broke into a run, laughing as they weaved and bobbed through the crowded streets of Philadelphia. Lizzie felt like a teenager, like this young, wild thing that was in desperate search of the next rush of pleasure. In the hotel elevator, they laughed and kissed, Rake pressing her against the shiny golden wall, rubbing against her as she wrapped her legs around his waist.
They stumbled through the hallway, Rake bracing her against the door as he fumbled for the keycard, Lizzie’s hands making desperate circuits across his body—back, arms, neck, hair—any part she could reach, until he finally got the door open and they collapsed inside.
Clothes were ripped off in a blur, and they fell to the bed in a tangle of limbs and lust, soft groans of pleasure.
In the aftermath, they looked at each other, sharing goofy, sheepish grins, before deciding, in some unspoken understanding, to close their eyes.
Lizzie woke some time later, the last rays of early summer casting a glow around the hotel room, bathing Rake in beautiful golden light as he slept with one of his muscled arms draped carelessly over her. Her heart beat with a spastic rhythm as a pesky feeling tried to creep into its chambers.
Her instincts told her to run, told her to get out before a feeling could gain purchase. But she was so comfortable and weighted down. Her mind wasn’t far away in a different world, and she wasn’t meandering off in the twists and turns of some distracted thought.
This has an end date, she reasoned. It’s okay to enjoy it for now. Nothing more can happen after tonight.
She told herself it didn’t matter that this would be the first time she’d ever literally slept with a guy, spent the night with someone she kind of … liked. It didn’t mean anything that she cautiously cuddled closer to him, that she pressed her nose into the spot where his shoulder met his neck and breathed in like she could snort his sea salt and citrus scent straight into her veins. She told herself it was inconsequential that he made her come but also made her laugh. That he talked to her instead of just fucking her.