Sweet Forty-Two(72)

“Georgia?” Regan ducked his head into my line of vision, grinning cautiously.

My face had grown hot, my breathing unsure. Coming out in the broken sounds of someone tripping in tap shoes.

“Are you okay? You look...” Regan’s forehead bunched up as he walked toward me.

“Hey,” he tried again, softer, touching my shoulder.

I looked up at him. Those eyes. The ones that watched me move around the kitchen and when he thought I wasn’t looking. The ones that promised me, without his words, that he was genuine.

“I...” I trailed off, looking around the room for a reason not to. There were hundreds.

I ignored them.

I jumped.

I kissed him.

Holy shit, I kissed him.

I stood on my tiptoes, put my hands on his cheeks like every cliché I hate, and pressed my mouth hard onto his. My height made me fully commit to the kiss. I couldn’t just give him a peck in passing. I had to get all the way up on my toes.

Then he moaned a little. Louder at the beginning than the end, like he hadn’t intended on me hearing it in the first place. But I did. And it made me kiss him harder.

He slid a hand down my side and around to my lower back, the tremble of his nerves giving themselves away against my heated skin. A second later I was lifted onto the counter, Regan seemingly impatient with our ridiculous height difference. He wanted my mouth as much as I wanted his and needed to be closer.

Our mouths didn’t separate as we ran fingers through each other’s hair. Heavy breaths surged through our nostrils as our tongues took up all the available space in each other’s mouths. I let out a shrill noise from the back of my throat. Excitement. Muffled by the fullness of his tongue, it rang through as desire. Need.

I did need. More.

God it felt good. Amazing. His hands felt in my hair exactly how I wanted them to feel. His rough, tight hands over the back of my neck and up through my hair.

No. I had to stop.

Now.

“Shit,” I whispered as I pulled away from his mouth. Hard and breathless.

Regan’s lips remained parted, at the ready as his eyes opened.

“Shit,” I said again, sliding off the counter and walking to the far side of it. “Sorry.”

Regan looked around. Back and forth on the floor, to each window, the ceiling and the floor, and back to me. I bit my lip to take away from what the intensity of his gaze did to my insides. He looked fantastically deranged in his post-kiss glory. His hair a mess, half out of the elastic holding it away from his face.

“Sorry? Sorry?” He was as breathless as I felt, though my own breathing was remarkably measured.

My voice, though, shook from my error. Premeditated, maybe. But lots of premeditated things are errors. “I ... I’m sorry for ... I didn’t mean to just ... I got carried away.” My words spilled out like marbles on a tile floor.

“Georgia...” The seductive Celtic caramel of his voice preceded him as he walked toward me in a hurry. His hands were on my face this time, and damn it if it didn’t look like he was going to kiss me.

“What?” I said it inside of an exhale. A sigh and a prayer rolled into one.

“What do you want?”

You.

“I ... I don’t ... what do you mean?”

“I think you want to kiss me again.”

I nodded. I’d completely lost any sense I had.

He reached for my hands. His were clammy but strong. I let them hold mine.

“But for some reason, you don’t want to kiss me again right now, right? Not yet?”

It was like he was singing me a lullaby as he reached up and stroked my cheek with his thumb.

I nodded again, undone were my defenses against him getting inside my head. He’d found an underground tunnel, the bastard. Probably through my tongue.

“I want to kiss you again, too. I don’t know when, either. But you’re going to be the next girl I kiss. That ... that I do know.” He moved his thumb to my mouth, gliding the pad of it across my lips as if storing the address in his body’s GPS system.

And, as if nothing happened at all, he turned and went back to the flours. To the chocolate chip cookies.

And me? I was racing full speed away from the Red Queen. Screaming at myself to wake up.





Regan

She tasted exactly like I thought she would. Sugar. That’s not meant to be some cute sort of mental tie-in my brain made because we were standing in her bakery. Her lips were actually sweet. Dipped in nectar and pressing against mine.

The look in her eyes before she kissed me did not lead me to believe that wrapping her arms around my neck was going to be her next move. Her nostrils flared and eyes widened like there was a giant spider crawling on my shoulder and she was about to brush it away. Instead ... the kiss.

I hadn’t stopped thinking about what it might be like to kiss her since the day I almost had, several weeks ago. It was over so fast tonight that the only solution was to do it again. Not yet, though. It wouldn’t be fair to her or Rae if I went ahead kissing the hell out of Georgia the way I badly craved without first truly addressing the card from Rae. Making sure that what I was doing was kissing Georgia. Not Rae’s ghost.

I finished in the bakery as quickly as possible, lying to Georgia that I’d received a 9-1-1 text from Ember and needed to get over there. The only 9-1-1 text was from me to Ember. Georgia didn’t question it, or seem weird about it, even though it was encroaching on five o’clock in the morning. She seemed just as desperate as I was to get into her corner and reassess what the hell it was that had just happened between us.