Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(59)
Grappling for self-control, he rolled away from her, sitting up and swinging his legs off the side of the bed in a rush, the sunlight from the cracked window blinds making him squint. He scrubbed his hands through his hair and down his face, begging his erection to leave him alone. He tried to think about work and the big launch party happening that day.
Dominic had been particularly foul and abusive to the team over the past week, everything down to the color of napkins for the event making him bark and snap, commonly stating that they were all tasteless morons dead set on ruining the Onism brand before it even gained legs. While Rake was making decent progress on securing exclusive campaigns with key distributors, he was rapidly burning out from being a rat on a wheel in the process.
Lizzie stirred on the other side of the mattress, and he glanced at her over his shoulder. What he saw caused an odd shaky feeling in his chest, his breath catching for a moment in his throat.
She had rolled to face his side of the bed, one arm reaching out into the space he had just left, her hair spilling in red waves across the pillow. A triangle of morning sun sliced across the room and glowed against her skin, a soft pink obvious below her outrageous freckles.
She looked so soft. So lovely. Like an exquisite painting too precious to ever touch.
Which was ridiculous.
Because it was Lizzie. Loud, vibrant, exuberant Lizzie who thrived on human contact, and he needed to stop being so weird about her. Stop being so … damn emotional.
In a flash—because Lizzie seemed incapable of doing anything subtly or slowly—her eyes blazed open, sparking as they roamed around the room before landing on Rake.
“What are you staring at, weirdo?” she said with a yawn, stretching her arms over her head.
“You have a big booger hanging out of your nose,” Rake said, aiming for an aloofness he didn’t feel.
“What!” Lizzie rubbed the palm of her hand against her nose, crinkling it in a way that Rake found disastrously adorable. And arousing. What was wrong with him?
“Did I get it?” she asked, pushing up to sitting and tucking her top lip against her teeth.
Rake tried to bite back a smile as he pretended to study her nose carefully. “No, still there.”
Lizzie scrubbed again, even using the collar of her shirt to pinch her nose. It should have been gross. It wasn’t.
“Now?”
Rake sighed. “No, it’s … Oh wait. What’s that?”
“What?”
Rake pulled a concerned face. “Lizzie, I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but…” His eyes flicked away from her.
“Aware of what?” she said, touching her face all over.
“I hate to be the one to break the news—and please don’t burst into hysterics—but it seems as though you have a little spot on your skin right”—he circled his finger around—“there,” he said, touching the tip of her nose.
Lizzie stared cross-eyed at his finger before jerking back, grabbing a pillow, and flinging it at him. “You mean my freckles?” She let out a booming laugh. “You had me scrubbing my face over a freckle?”
“I told you not to get hysterical.”
“You’re right, this does come as a shock,” she said, rolling her eyes and getting out of bed. “I only have 4.2 million freckles on my body, but I didn’t know there was a booger-shaped one right there.”
She moved toward the kitchen, and Rake’s legs twitched with the bizarre impulse to trail after her.
She had on tiny cotton shorts that barely covered her generous hips, and a thin tank top that would likely kill him. Any progress he’d made on controlling his erection was shot to hell, and he tried to adjust himself without her noticing. God, he desperately needed a wank.
But there was no damn privacy in their place. It was moments like these that he hated himself for getting an open floor plan apartment. What a fucking idiot. It wasn’t like he jerked off with a great deal of regularity before all of this. He’d lived in such a gray hole of self-pity that masturbation often felt like more work than it was worth, but he’d had no way to anticipate just how potent Lizzie’s presence would be.
He imagined little blood ever reached his brain with how frequently and furiously she turned him on. And she didn’t seem to have a bloody clue. He’d seen her in her seductive mode, and he’d thought that was irresistible. But Lizzie in the morning? In her tiny scraps of pajamas, moaning over a cup of coffee?
Or Lizzie in the evening, home from the bakery smelling like sweetness and sin as she pulled off her work clothes in the middle of the goddamn apartment to change into her “comfy clothes” and ridiculously thick glasses?
Or Lizzie at night? Her body so close on the bed, he could feel the heat of her? Hear her soft breathing? Smell the traces of sugar on her skin?
Those things were the definition of irresistible.
And yet, he resisted.
“Why are you just standing in here?” Lizzie asked, padding toward him with a proffered cup of coffee. He took it, and she used her free arm to wrap him in a little hug. Rake reflexively shifted his hips away.
While Rake didn’t cross the touch barrier, Lizzie sure as hell did with stunning frequency. She touched and hugged and reached out her hand like human contact was essential to her existence—like she had so much energy, her body couldn’t contain it all and she needed to pass on the warmth of it to whoever was near.