Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight) (39 page)

“Don’t
wanna
.”

She was so hot where he was wedged that he could feel it clear through two pairs of jeans, but he wanted to be closer to the heat, so he deposited her back down on her feet and went clumsily after the button of her jeans. She helped and shed the jeans on the floor, along with red patent-leather clogs and a pair of wool socks.

She wore bright-red boy shorts, as she’d described last night, nearly all lace except for a V-shaped panel in the front that made him want to get down on his knees and bury his face at the point of that instructive arrow.

“Those are
hot
.”

Then he obeyed naked instinct and knelt and pressed his face against her, breathing in the at-the-source scent of the arousal he’d been so entranced by on New Year’s Eve—like some direct line to his dick, which was jealous of his face for getting to be buried in her crotch. He found the damp fabric between her legs and rubbed his fingers from there up to the spot that made her whimper and clutch his head, and then he licked her, too, and bit her.

“Miles!”

“You like the friction through the cloth, right? Like this?”

“Miles …”

She was rubbing against his face and fingers, and things were all so muddled up that he was licking his own fingers and the cloth of her panties. Finally he just pulled them down and parted her labia with his tongue, teasing her clit. She had red curls, a neat, well-groomed triangle of them. He drew back for a moment and cupped his hand over her, and she groaned and draped herself over his head. “You’re
killing
me,” she said.

“Told you,” he said. “All that was just foreplay. Even the phone sex. Is there a matching bra?”

“There is.”

He stood and peeled off her shirt. “Oh,
man
.” He sucked a nipple into his mouth through the lace of the bra, got his hand around the sweet, sweet curve of her, and,
fuck
, he was hard—he
wanted in her so bad, and the more of those whimpery little desperate noises she made, the worse it got.

“Miles,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Fuck me.”

He groaned against her skin, then pulled away, fisted his T-shirt, and dragged it off. “That was hot,” she said. “You can do that anytime.”

Her hands were on the button of his jeans, which she made short work of, and then she eased his zipper down, so slowly that it qualified as a form of torture, slid her hand into the V of his jeans, and grabbed him through his briefs. Her fist was
way
better than his fist, and he thrust experimentally into her grip a few times before he decided that that was a bad idea and stopped. She ran a thumb over the ridge of his head and massaged the spot where his briefs were damp from pre-cum, then she took pity on him and shoved his jeans down and eased his briefs over his hips, freeing him.

“Show me what you did last night.”

He showed her, fist tight around his dick, but it was the look in her eyes that was doing it for him, avid and uninhibited. “You can do it if you want.” He meant it as an offer, but it came out more like pleading.

She did want, and the sensation of having someone else take him in hand—the last couple of years with Deena had been all married-sex utilitarian non-touchy stuff—pretty much blew the top of his head off.

“Or maybe you should wait on that.” He stayed her hand.

So she touched his chest and stomach instead, running her small, cool palms over him until the touch heated up and felt nearly as dangerously hot as the jerk of her fist.

“There’s a condom in my bag,” she said, and there was—a whole box of them, in a plastic drugstore bag. Holy shit, she’d been thinking of this the whole time she was headed his way. He tore the packet open and rolled it on. He was at that poised-on-the-edge place where even putting the condom on felt like too much, until he’d rolled it all the way down and the added tightness at the base of his cock calmed things down a tiny bit. He picked her up and backed her into the door, lowering her slowly until he could feel her liquid heat on the head of his cock. He could feel her dripping, running down his cock, even through the latex, which made
him stupidly desperate and not quite as gentle as he meant to be when he thrust into her.

She didn’t seem to care. She yelled his name when he filled her and several times as he withdrew and reseated. Her breasts moved against his chest, the nipples hard points that gave him something to think about other than the lunatic pressure building in his groin, and he tweaked both nipples and watched her face as she came, her mouth open in a silent cry, her face flushed, her head thrown back. When she lost control of her silence and made a harsh, stuttered “Aaaah” sound in the back of her throat, he came like a fucking avalanche.

When he regained full use of his brain and limbs, he was kneeling on the floor with her resting on his thighs, and he was still buried in her. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten from standing to kneeling.

“We are going to have to extend the Richter scale to twenty,” she said.

* * *

Miles laughed, and Nora felt the hard muscles under her thighs, his sculpted biceps under her hands, vibrate with the motion. His body was like some kind of Renaissance sculpture, all clean, smooth, living marble. She had time now to appreciate, to trace the line of his shoulder to the well-muscled cap, to stroke a hand down over his pecs, the male curves and angles of his torso—not too bodybuilder-processed, with real-human-being slight ridges on his flat belly—to where the trail of coarse hair disappeared between their bodies. She sighed her happiness.

“It wasn’t
anything
like that with Henry.”

Possibly that wasn’t the sort of thing she should say. Probably she should have kept her mouth shut. But her orgasm had taken her inhibitions with it, and she mostly wanted to crawl inside him and have him know everything that was in her head. How much she loved his house, at least what she could see of it from the front hall—a wood stove in the room to the right, a wall of leaded-glass windows to their left, the kind of old-fashioned radiator that clanked at night, behind an elaborate screen of lacy patterned metal. The kinds of details people had once cared about.

She wanted to tell him how scared she had been, on the cab ride from the Cleveland airport to his house, that she was deluding herself. How she’d relived over and over the terrible fantasy that she would arrive to discover he had a secret life, one with no room for her, that all
the talk about dates and getting together and how in-person would be so much better had been whistling in the wind.

She wanted to confess, in a no-holding-back deluge of words, how much she liked him. Her taste buds, the little hairs that rose on the back of her neck, her freckles,
liked
him.

She could have told him any one of those things, but instead what had popped out of her mouth was the kind of comparison she knew you weren’t supposed to make, even favorably.

“Who’s Henry?”

“Henry’s the man I was on the rebound from on New Year’s Eve.”

He listened alertly, and she rested her cheek on his shoulder because it was easier to talk without him watching her so closely. “Henry messed me up. We’d been together three years, and I had this elaborate fantasy about how he was going to propose to me on Christmas. Or New Year’s Eve, maybe?”

He touched her hair, the part where it lay raggedly against the nape of her neck. Stroked his fingers through it, a soothing repetition.

“And, God, maybe he would have, who knows, but then I read an email he’d written to the other woman he was sleeping with. He’d been sleeping with her
for nine months
.”

“Jesus.”

“I know, right? Anyway, at that party, I guess I was saying ‘fuck you’ to Henry.” He was quiet.

She lifted her head. His gaze wouldn’t quite meet hers. “Wait, no, that came out wrong. That’s how it started, as a fuck-you to Henry. But that’s—I—”

“Hey. I’m happy to have been the lucky beneficiary of the fuck-you party for Henry.” He pushed her spiky bangs off her forehead, the pad of his thumb moving gently across her skin, starting a line of heat there that connected to other vital parts of her. “He didn’t deserve you, you know. I hope you know that. I hope I’m stating the painfully obvious.”

She sighed. “In my better moments, I do know that.”

“I will do my best to remind you of it, often.”

“Often.” A word that suggested time stretching before them, a relationship, all kinds of possibility. She felt full of emotions, like things too close to bubbling over on the stove. She touched his face, rough with dark stubble. His eyes were not quite as sad as they’d been on New Year’s Eve, but she thought it would still be fair to describe them as haunted.

“Are you hungry? You must have gotten up at the crack of dawn.”

“I’m starving,” she admitted.

He helped her extricate herself and stand, then stood, too. “Food first? Shower first?”

“Oh,
God
,” she said. “That’s a tough call. Food.”

Watching him get dressed—watching how he hopped on one foot to insert himself in his jeans, how he disappeared into his shirt, that flat expanse of abs still peeking at her, and then reappeared, hair ruffled, already smiling for her—made her want to start the process again, to peel him out of his things and go another round. She reached into her satchel for a new pair of panties—turquoise lace bikinis—then dressed herself, as he watched with narrowed eyes. She half-expected him to intervene, but he didn’t, just watched like someone too polite to dive in to Thanksgiving dinner before grace was said.

He led her down a narrow hallway into the kitchen. There was the dishwasher, with a neon-orange
Do Not Use Me
Post-it note, and the range, which looked as if it had cooked when Jimmy Carter was president. The ceiling was high, sunlight rushed in through enormous windows, and his things were scattered over the counters and on the kitchen table.

His things. She had never realized how much intimacy there was in being able to see the mundane details of a person’s life, not until she had been introduced to Miles in this slow, backward way. She’d had sex with him before she’d gotten to see that his refrigerator was papered with
New Yorker
cartoons and photographs, before she’d had a chance to note that his dishes looked like hand-thrown pottery, before she’d glimpsed the T-shirt tossed over the chair or the stacks of unopened mail or the yellow do-it-yourself home-repair book.

He got out a loaf of thick-sliced multigrain bread, jars of mayo and mustard, a clamshell of fussy greens, waxed-paper deli packages of ham and provolone. He began assembling two sandwiches on those slightly warped, irregular plates, blue glaze over a stony-looking first coat.

“Did someone make those for you?”

He lifted the tape on the lunch meat and spread the packages open. “My ex-fiancée was a potter.”

An ex-fiancée. The history behind the sad eyes? “The plates are beautiful.”

He didn’t volunteer more and she didn’t push it. “Do you want me to make my own sandwich?”

“Just as easy to make two as one. Unless you want to make it so you can decide how
much of what you want?”

“Nah.”

She watched the flex and shift of the muscles and tendons in his forearms as he made the sandwiches, the dark hair straight and feathery but definitively masculine. He worked slowly, carefully, spreading mayo and mustard to the edges of the bread, distributing the lettuce evenly. The same guy who would cook dinner alone in the kitchen, who would run his dishwasher every night.

Hard to reconcile him with the guy who’d abandoned himself so completely to burying his face between her legs earlier. She loved that contradiction.

They ate sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. He took big, manly bites and chewed with his mouth closed. He got points for both of those features.

He swallowed and stared at her for a moment, and she knew something was about to happen even before he asked, “How long can you stay?”

As long as you want me to
.

She was worried about this, this lack of caution on the part of her subconscious. It concerned her that it might say something against her better judgment. She’d open her mouth and words like that would fall out. Or she’d beg him for something.
Like me as much as I like you
.

That would be embarrassing. And, on a deeper level, she worried that the lack of caution, her willingness to do one crazy thing after another, would eventually hurt. A lot.

You’re so trusting
.

Henry had meant that her trust in him had been misplaced, but probably she was also too trusting in general that things would work out okay. Look at her willingness to hop on that plane and put herself in a position to get smacked down. Miles could have opened the door, taken one look at her, and called in a restraining order.

Restraining order, heh
, Beavis and Butt-Head supplied, and she swallowed a giggle. “My return flight is Sunday afternoon, but I don’t have to stay here. One of my college roommates is here, and I told her I might crash with her, if …”

If you’d done what any sane person would have done and assumed I was a crazed stalker
.

“You don’t have to do that. You can hang with me.”

That was good—Christmas-morning good—and like a kid on Christmas morning she was
greedy for more. She wanted it wrapped up and tied with a bow. She wanted him to
ask
.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, he added, “I want you here. As long as you can stay.”

It was almost too much, the warmth and thrill, and she had to look away from him so he wouldn’t see everything in her eyes. Declarations and confessions, hasty and
too trusting
.

“Okay.”

He took a bite of sandwich. Chewed. Set the sandwich down. Gazed at her for a long moment, until her face got hot and the heat sank into her breasts and belly. “It’s weird that you’re here,” he said.

“Is it too weird?”

He looked at his sandwich, the corners of the kitchen, the stacks of mail, as if the answer were out there somewhere, just out of reach. “No. It’s too normal.”