When she turned, body perked like the doe’s, heightened by animal instinct, she saw it in his eyes, too, as Mike leaned down and took her lips with his.
Bringing Laura up here had been a dicey move. He hadn’t really thought much about his request to make a first date out of a hike, but then again he wasn’t exactly Mr. Suave. And this was his life, so sharing it with someone upfront made a certain kind of sense to him. Get reality out of the way and if the other person still wanted to see him, then great. If not, they didn’t waste their time and could move on. If only everything were so simple. Dating, so far, hadn’t been, no matter how hard he tried to make it cut and dried.
He found solace—he found peace—he found meaning and fun and even excitement in the woods, on the slopes, on a long run. When he ran, his mind turned off and something deeper turned on. An awareness of being that he only got from the pounding of his soles against the pavement, against the dirt, on the trail.
Most people didn’t like the way he lived. It was too different, too quiet, too introspective and too focused on doing and not focused enough on talking or posturing or obvious displays of status or of involvement in things that just didn’t matter to him. He wanted to move. He wanted to run. He wanted to ski. He wanted to help people. And to his surprise, as he’d reached adulthood, he’d found that there weren’t that many women, or men for that matter, who valued that.
He watched Laura closely and had liked what he saw. She wasn’t an outdoors type but she was gamely marching on up this hill; he could tell she wasn’t a hiker. He could tell she wasn’t the type who would, on her own, take the initiative and go for a long bike or a run or a swim. She certainly wasn’t a triathlete, but she had a gentleness about her and openness and a willingness to just be that he didn’t find in many people.
He didn’t find it in any people other than, strangely enough, Dylan—and then in Jill. And so when he leaned in to kiss Laura, he surprised himself; that was the last thing he expected he would do on a first date. He wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who wined and dined women, and yet this felt right. It felt perfect.
Something in him deepened as their mouths met, as he reached for her, as he claimed those curves for his own. In that moment, he rose up and a finesse, a sophistication that he knew was there but buried very deep, surged to the surface. This woman was his, in his arms as she softened, opening up to him, their tongues intertwining. He would definitely not be just sharing this woman with Dylan. They would be partners with this woman.
Arousal burst through his veins, like a pump turned on, a switch flipped, with a sudden explosion of want and need and lust. Hungry for more of her in his hands, on his lips, against his body, he searched her, like going on a journey through another person’s land, and found that his need to explore was absolutely endless. His erection pressed against her leg as she leaned into him pushing, searching, wanting. The two joined in an obvious mutual exploration that made him wish he had asked her to his cabin for dinner so that a bed were handy.
And then his mind slipped into that place it went when he ran, when he skied, when he hiked. He had never been able to access that part of himself through anything but heavy exertion or laser-like focus on the kinesthetics of life, but here, here he found himself shifting. A subtle and then suddenly dramatic movement from one layer of life to another.
As her hands roamed over his shoulders, felt his back, tightened over his waist and went elsewhere, he filled with a warmth, with an urgency that eighteen months of grief and denial and restraint and constraint had allowed to grow into something so strong, something so big that it was in their kiss, and her touch unleashed it, here and now.
It just was. Endless and timeless and present, exactly as it had been with Jill.
But more.
Oh, my God, what was she doing? She still had Dylan’s taste in the back of her throat, Dylan’s scent on parts of her skin in spite of her thorough shower this morning, Dylan’s essence deep inside her—and here she was in the arms of another man. A godlike, amazing, muscular man. She felt his warmth underneath his clothes and wanted desperately to feel his skin without the layer between them.
How could this be happening? How could two incredible men want her and within twenty-four hours of each other? This was...her mind went blank as Mike probed her mouth, his tongue filled with more questions and answers, his hands thick and strong, grabbing and caressing and owning parts of her. Her own questions faded, melted into the warm wetness of his mouth and she knew, just knew on some deep level, some layer within herself that she didn’t even know she had, that this was so much more than she ever anticipated when that little chat window had popped up this morning.