“Except a vampire kiss. Those are not so good, like in that movie Mom was in.”
“You’re not supposed to watch movies like that. It’s too old for you.”
“Mom lets us. We watched it last time we saw her.”
“Right. Well, I’ll have to tell her that you’re too young for vampire kisses then. I’ll tuck you up again.”
Reid whispers in my ear as he goes off with Jack. “Don’t go away.”
I touch my lips, still tender where he kissed me. Is this for real? He says he wants me, but does he only mean that because I am there, offering myself on a plate, making it easy for him to take what he wants and leave me when someone better comes along?
This was such a bad idea. All of it. Coming here at all. Wearing the red dress. Making it obvious how much I want him. Kissing him back. I shouldn’t have done any of that.
“You’re overthinking this,” he says, surprising me with a kiss on the back of my neck. He must have bundled Jack back into bed in record time.
“Maybe I wasn’t thinking enough. This is a bad idea, isn’t it?”
“Wrong. This is one of the best ideas we’ve ever had.”
CHAPTER 10
Reid
I don’t want Holly to run off to her room again, but she looks as if she might bolt at any moment.
“Hey, let’s just go and sit for a while and talk things through. Can we do that?”
She nods and follows me into the living room, perching on the edge of the couch as if she won’t be there long.
I sit in the chair to give her space, though putting space between us is the last thing I want. “We can stop this now if that’s what you’d like. But I’d like you to give this a chance.”
She shakes her head as if she doesn’t believe me. “I bet women throw themselves at you all the time, don’t they? And I’m just another one, except I’m right across the hall from you. It makes things so easy for you.”
“You think that’s what this is? I’m not short of offers, Holly. And this isn’t easy, far from it. There’s everything against it. Your age. God knows what your dad will say. I shouldn’t want you, but I do. For a long time, you were my friend’s daughter and nothing more, but that first year you came back from college, you turned my head and I couldn’t believe I’d never seen you that way before.”
“I thought you always saw me as a kid.”
“Well, it seemed like you were a kid one minute, and then suddenly a sexy knock-me-dead fully-grown woman showed up the next. You wore your blue dress to the twins’ birthday party, and I had to turn away to avoid you seeing my reaction.”
“I wish I’d noticed that.”
“The timing would have been terrible, anyway. Mercia and I had just admitted it was pointless pretending we would ever be happy together and started divorce proceedings. I was in a bad place.”
“Are you in a better place now?”
“A very good place from where I’m sitting, looking at you in your beautiful red dress.”
She smiles. “You like?”
“I like. Katie’s right.”
“She is?”
I join Holly on the couch, tucking her hair behind her ear, and whisper, “Boobies make all the difference to how it looks.”
She giggles, and I hold her in my arms, her softness against my chest. She looks up at me and I kiss her again. I can’t stop kissing her. I kiss her, breathing in the honest-to-goodness apple scented essence of her until she is gasping for breath.
“What kind of kiss was that?” she asks. “Not the good night, sleep tight kind.”
“No, it was the ‘I want to kiss the hell out of you’ kind. The ‘I need you in my bed right now’ kind. But we’re not going to rush this.”
Holly pouts.
“I want you to give you a chance to think things through. I need to know you want this one hundred percent because once you’re in my bed, there’s no going back to how things were.”
“I don’t need to think. I want you, Reid.”
“And I want you too, but you’ve had wine. And you were upset. I’m going to L.A. for a few days, so I don’t want to take you to bed and then have to leave you alone. It will give you a chance to think while I’m gone.”
I’m full of noble intentions, but I’m also deluding myself when it comes to my ability to resist her. A light kiss on her lips turns into so much more. She’s moaning against me, my hands roaming her body, when I pick her up and carry her upstairs to her bed.
“I don’t need time to think,” she says, when I lay her on the bed. “Don’t go.”