Hot and Bothered(33)
“Really? Is that what you think the best approach to this situation is? I had it under control. We told him I was seeing someone—”
“And he couldn’t fucking leave it alone. He couldn’t—”
“You can’t keep doing this, Mark. You can’t keep reacting to every little thing he does and says to you. You’re totally stuck in the last decade. And you’re going to shoot yourself in the foot. Hell, you’re going to launch a weapon of mass destruction at your foot. How many second chances do you think you’re going to get?”
“I—”
He didn’t find himself at a loss for words too often, but this was Haven. And he was not rational where she was concerned, apparently. The barbershop, the department store, the blues jam—nope, not rational.
“You act like a guy who has nothing to lose, but that’s not how it is, Mark. You told me yourself, you need this tour. You need this money. Think about your dad.”
He hadn’t been thinking about his dad when Pete was taunting him into yet another stupid reaction, nor of the new batch of hospital bills that had shown up yesterday. He’d been thinking about Haven—the way she listened, the way she noticed. Her breath on his cheek, her whisper in his ear, the smell of her, the all-over satin glorious sheen of her. How much he wanted her in his hands, around his cock, under him.
He didn’t want Pete Sovereign to spend one single solitary moment alone in her company.
“I don’t want him to touch you.”
He’d said it on impulse, without thought, without regard to what those words would feel like, said out loud. For him or for her.
She froze, then deflated quickly, the anger leaving her face, her posture softening. Hearing the words, I don’t want him to touch you, she’d understood what he was trying to say to her: I don’t want anyone but me to touch you.
She was staring at him as if she’d never seen him before, her eyes big, her lower lip soft and full. It was as if she was begging to be kissed, although there was something uncertain in her stance, a hesitation he’d glimpsed only a few times before, mostly during those exposed moments in the mirror. Then she’d looked so unlike the woman Haven Hoyt presented to the world, so unlike the woman he knew she desperately wanted him and everyone else to see.
Haven. This was the woman he wanted to touch, to slip inside, to find his way to the heart of.
He acted without thought, taking her mouth with his. He kissed her hard, pressing his way into her as if he owned her, as if she’d given him permission.
She was giving him permission. She opened and softened and her whole body yielded to his, fitting against his length, all heat and spark. She whimpered into his mouth, little bursts of sound every time he found a new part of her with his tongue or mapped out another contour of her body with his hands. The tight, satisfying arch of her ass, the nipped-in slimness of her waist, and against his chest, driving him mad, her full curves. He’d have to let go of her mouth to do it, but he could dip his head and slick his tongue over the upper surface of her breast, and it was, he learned, indeed, as smooth as satin.
She’s going to make me stop, he kept thinking. She’s going to make me stop.
But she didn’t. Far from it. She wrapped her fingers in his hair, and with her other hand she groped at his waistband, tugging up his sweater, pulling his T-shirt out of his pants, slipping her small, cool palm up his torso, over his abs, up to his chest. Her hand warmed as she stroked his chest and found his nipple with her thumb. She toyed with it, something he’d never thought he liked, until now.