Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It’s one second, maybe two. It shouldn’t be long enough to feel. To taste.
Shouldn’t be.
But is. I do.
Adam’s mouth is warm against mine, sweet from chocolate and spicy from dinner. It sends those same sensations rippling through my body. Sweet, aching pleasure blooms in my chest, fuzzes out my mind into a haze of only him. And heat—his hand on my hip, the other on my face, a thumb dipping into the creases from where I fell asleep on his shoulder. The liquid fire unfurling deep in my gut. How can one man taste like so many different things and still be my new favorite flavor?
He jerks back, shock widening his eyes. “I’m—”
“No.” I shake my head violently, capturing his mouth again. Our teeth clack together. He doesn’t get to be sorry. Not when it’s this good.
Adam groans deep in his throat, and my mouth catches the sound, keeps it somewhere below my belly button. His hand wraps more firmly around my skull, fingers entangling with the hair at my nape as he slants my head for better access. I stretch on the balls of my feet, desperate to be closer. As close as possible.
The hand on my face slides languidly over my neck, my shoulder, the edge of my bra and back around my ribs, and with another deep-throated grunt, Adam lifts me with one arm, towing my body into his so our mouths can fit together again and again.
I reach with my tongue first, because I need more of him. I wish my feet were still on the ground, so I could move for us, have him press me into the counter, slot between my legs and have whatever’s digging into my stomach go lower. Groaning, his tongue meets mine, nails scraping my scalp. He holds me tighter. Kisses me harder.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Lovie says, letting out a whoop that turns into a cough.
Adam pulls back, all his features painted with surprise. He flexes his hand on my waist, and the shock grows louder, like he didn’t give it permission to move there in the first place.
He slides me down his body slowly. I’m too numb to appreciate all the hard planes I have to pass to find the floor again.
“Don’t stop on my account,” Lovie says, purple pajamas disheveled.
Bitter cold flashes up my spine as his hand falls away from my body once I’m on solid ground. If you could call it that. My eyes water with the ice in the air, how fast the temperature dropped after his hands left me, and a sound of disbelief gets lodged in my throat alongside the last Snickers bar I stole from him.
Is the only reason Adam kissed me because he heard my grandmother coming?
I thought—
Well.
It doesn’t matter.
“I—” He steps back, his hands fisted at his side. Manages to get out the apology I stopped before. “I’m sorry,” he says, knives to my ears and still-stinging lips. He pivots on his socked feet. “Did you need something, Lovie?”
She goes on to say something about how thirsty she is, or a headache, or something else I can’t hear over the torrent of blood in my ears.
I slip through the laundry closet and lock myself in the bathroom. In this light, with the rosy curtains and hand soap and toilet paper (October is breast cancer awareness month, after all), my face has taken on some of that coloring. Bright-pink splotches on my cheeks that trail down my neck like ivy.
Was it the flirting? The kiss? Adam himself? I wipe the back of my hand across my mouth but leave it there, like I can keep his kiss longer that way.
If I’m going to be kissed, I want to be kissed . Make it count, the way Lovie always told me it should. Not have it followed up with an apology or halfhearted excuse.
I guess he didn’t read that line in his employee contract—
Oh.
Of course.
He’s working. He is my employee . Not directly—I pay the agency, and the agency pays him—but it still crossed one line too many. This is strictly a professional situation for him. And regardless of what Lovie believes, it doesn’t give us express permission to go around lip-locking, no matter how much our toes touch during movies or Jeopardy! or when he pours me coffee.
No matter how much I’m starting to suspect I want those very things.