“Where you going to go?”
“Parkdale, I think,” she said, naming the up-and-coming neighborhood where she’d squatted in Cassie’s apartment the first week post-jilting. It had been fun and vibrant, and she was suddenly feeling like Forest Hill just wasn’t…age appropriate. Look at her right now, for God’s sake. She was bringing a hookup home to her giant empty house. It was full of rooms. So many rooms, when they really only needed one. “But I’m not in a hurry. If I don’t find anything I like before I have to close on this place, I’ll just rent for a while.”
He raised an eyebrow. She hated that his reflexive reaction to her plan was skepticism. “Because you’re so freewheeling? Just drifting though life with no plan, no agenda.”
She ground her teeth. “Exactly.” Seriously, if they were keeping it casual, did he have the right to psychoanalyze her? She hopped out of the car and strode up the path to the front door. She was just turning the key when he started to say something. She didn’t think she could stand it. If he said another critical word, she might remember all the reasons she used to hate him and send him away. And that was unacceptable.
So she held up a palm. “Less talking.” She left the rest unsaid.
“Less talking, more…?” he prompted. Of course, he wasn’t going to let that slide.
Screw it. New Amy took what she wanted, no shame. So she whirled on him, put her hands on her hips, and said, “Less talking, more fucking.”
…
It served him right. It fucking served him right. You play with fire—and Amy Morrison was nothing if not made of flames—you get burned.
But, speaking of fucking, and since he was already burned… When she closed the door behind her, he backed her up against it, crashing his mouth down on hers. But she was already there, meeting him halfway—more than halfway, reaching down and shoving her skirt down as her mouth opened greedily under his.
“Oh my God,” he moaned, slipping his rough palms along the impossibly soft skin of her hips, then sliding around to cup her ass as he ground his pelvis into hers. Foreplay, he tried to tell himself. Foreplay.
But before he could command his clumsy limbs to obey, she wrapped her arms around his neck and hiked her legs around his waist, so that she was pinned between him and the door. “Please tell me you have a condom somewhere on your person,” she panted.
In fact, he did. Feeling ambitious, he’d stuck one in his wallet when he’d come out to his parents’ house to crash the real estate manipulation tour. He couldn’t obey her fast enough. Even as the logical part of his mind continued to chant, foreplay, foreplay, he yanked his pants down and fumbled the condom on. Forcing himself to pause then—they were both fully dressed in work clothing from the waist up, for God’s sake—he continued to support her with one hand while extracting the other to begin working on unbuttoning the millions of tiny pearl buttons that ran down the front of the sky-blue sheer gauzy thing she called a blouse.
She shoved his hand away with a vehemence that startled him. “I want you inside me now,” she breathed, clamping her legs even harder around his waist. The need in her voice catapulted his lust, which was already hovering around an eleven, out of the stratosphere. So he pushed inside her, and oh, God, she’d been right—she was ready. So slick, so hot. He had to fight not to close his eyes against the onslaught of pleasure gathering in his lower back. He wanted to look at her. Her head lolled back against the door, scarlet lips parted and eyes closed in ecstasy.
Beautiful.
He rested his own mouth against those lips. Not kissing her, because that seemed opposed to what she wanted here, which was for them to focus all their energy on the tower of flame they were building, one breath, one thrust at a time. But he wanted those red lips, wanted to be marked with them.
He was trying to prolong things, but he was close. Just as he was trying to slow things down, his orgasm came over him all at once, and he let loose an involuntary shout and ground himself into her as deeply as he could as he was towed under the tidal wave.
But he only surrendered to the gutting pleasure for a moment before settling her legs back on the floor and sinking to his knees. She hadn’t come yet, and he didn’t think his own legs would work anymore anyway. Pressing his face against her, he took a moment to inhale, to savor the moment.
Once he started moving his tongue, she began moaning and squirming under him. When he added two fingers inside her, it only took her a minute. Then she was calling his name and sliding down the door to join him in a heap on the floor.