What a Bachelor Needs (Bachelor Auction Book 4)(17)

He chewed.

She chewed.

He kept his mouth closed, just.

Claire…tried.

Resolutely, he averted his gaze so that he didn’t choke on his stupid smile and spoil everything. He swallowed hard. He tried not to notice a small copycat cherub.

“Do you still play?”

“I’ll play my father every now and then but I’m embarrassingly out of practice.”

“Do you still love to play?”

“Yeah.” She smiled ruefully. “It never gets old. But you have to put the time in, and I don’t have that kind of time anymore. You also have to have someone who wants to give you a game, and I got sick of begging.”

“No women’s comp?”

“Not around here. All the big comps are mixed, by the way, not that women put in much of an appearance come finals time.” She shrugged. “In the end, I didn’t want the dream bad enough to accept the challenges. No regrets.”

“Give me a game one day? Show me a few tricks to impress fellow skiers with?”

“You’re on.”

“You have a little bit of cream,” he said, and touched his finger to his upper lip. “Right there.”

It was very distracting.

She tried to wipe at it with the pad of her thumb.

“Wrong side.” And now he was wholly fixated on her lips. “Remember that night half-a-dozen of us caught a lift out to River Bend in the back of someone’s pickup?”

She found the cream, transferred it to her thumb and stuck her thumb in her mouth. When her thumb reappeared moments later, the cream was gone. “I remember.”

“I nearly kissed you.”

“I nearly let you.” She lowered her gaze to the cracked Formica benchtop. “Why didn’t you?”

“Too many people.” For some reason, he’d wanted their first kiss to be private. He leaned forward, elbows on the counter. “We could try again now. Could prove interesting.”

“Jett Casey, are you between girlfriends again?”

“I am,” he confessed gravely. He hadn’t hooked up with anyone for well over six months. “I’m free and clear. You?”

“Yes. Well clear. Why do you want to kiss me?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“I’m just curious.”

“You want my honest answer?”

“Yes.”

All right. Or maybe it wouldn’t be right at all. “Don’t get mad.”

“Oh, this is going to be good,” she mumbled.

“When I held you that night in the alley, I—” There was really no delicate way to say it. “Responded. Slightly. And it wasn’t with disgust. And ever since then I’ve wondered whether I have this… let’s call it a kink…for a woman who’s leaning all over me.”

“Dazed and half unconscious?”

“I’m skipping that bit.”

She looked a little horrified.

“You did ask,” he reminded her. “And seeing as we’re doing honesty… This is the honesty kitchen, I’m sure of it. There’s nothing anyone can do in this kitchen except retreat inwards and engage in self-reflection—”

That one got a smile out of her.

“—so seeing as we’re doing painful honesty, I figure this for a perfect opportunity to test my, er, preferences.”

“By pretending that we’re sixteen again, in the back of a pickup and it’s summer time and we’re about to kiss?”

“Perfect.”

“We have an audience,” she said, glancing towards her daughter.

“I’ll keep it PG. We should probably determine what you want from this kiss as well.”

“I’m in it strictly for the potential pleasure and the curiosity,” she said. “Word has it that your kisses are excellent.”

“I have a kissing reputation?”

“From school.” She nodded gravely. “And not just kisses. Back then, your reputation for physical enjoyment and abandon covered just about everything.”

Fair enough.

He leaned across the counter and beckoned her closer with his finger. She thought his gesture amusing but moved in closer anyway, meeting him somewhere in the middle, her head slightly tilted. “Should there be a time limit?” he murmured, stretching out that moment of delicious anticipation before they began.

“You could start sometime this century. That might help.”

Impatient.

He moved in and set his lips to the very corner of hers, nothing more than the softest of touches as he gauged her responsiveness. Her lips curved for him and she tilted her head a little more. More to explore and all of it for him and he took his time as he mapped the curve of her lower lip until she opened for him, soft and pliant.

One taste. That was all it took for him to know it hadn’t been the heightened danger or emotion that had caught him unawares that night in Bozeman. Because here in the honesty kitchen, with a bright orange Formica bench between them, his response was immediate and insistent.

It was her.

He thought about burying his fingers in her hair, but he wasn’t ready to be reminded of hidden scars, so he cupped her cheek instead and kept right on kissing. PG, mostly.