Chapter 12 #3
He walked her back against the counter. The cold edge of it hit her hips just as the warm weight of him hit her front.
His hands found her waist, then moved down, his thumbs settling in the hollows above her hip bones.
She had a fistful of his shirt in one hand and his heart was racing, faster than she’d have believed possible, beneath her other hand.
The kiss deepened and deepened until there was nothing careful left in it at all.
He lifted her onto the counter in one smooth motion, putting her back against the cabinet and his hips between her knees.
She gasped into his mouth and wrapped her legs around his waist, her dress hitching up, the worn denim of his jeans soft against her bare legs.
He leaned into her grip and the sudden hard pressure of his erection against her core made her head spin.
Then his hand slid up her bare thigh and under the hem of the green dress.
She felt the prick of a claw retract before it touched her and it sent a shiver of excitement down her spine.
“Garrick—”
His mouth moved to her throat, his voice rough against her skin.
“Tell me to stop.”
“No.” The word came out embarrassingly fast, and she felt him smile against her throat.
“Then don’t ask me to be careful, little thorn.”
His hand slid further up her thigh, his thumb feathering the edge of her panties, and she knew if he moved an inch higher he’d discover how embarrassingly wet and needy she was.
She started to arch into his hand and her head fell back against the construction paper mosaic Toby had brought home from school. Reality came crashing down around her.
I’m not ready.
Her body was screaming the opposite, ten seconds from letting him take her right there on the counter. But the rest of her had a five-year-old asleep across town and she hadn’t done anything like this since before he was born. That part of her put a shaking hand against Garrick’s chest.
“Stop,” she whispered. “Wait. Just—wait.”
He stopped. Immediately. He lifted his head and looked at her, his eyes still blazing gold, but not with anger.
“I want this,” she said, and his hand flexed once against her thigh.
“But?”
“But I didn’t know I was going to want it quite this much. I know I invited you in, but this is all moving a little too fast for me. It’s not—” She laughed unsteadily and pressed her forehead to his chest. “God. It’s very much not you.”
He didn’t argue. He lifted her off the counter and set her back down on the floor. Her knees weren’t entirely reliable, and he kept one steadying hand at her waist until they were. Then he stepped back, drawing his wings in, and she immediately, absurdly, missed the shadow of them.
“Then we stop,” he said calmly.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t apologize. You invited me in. You didn’t sign a contract.”
That startled a laugh out of her, but there was something in his voice that made her wonder if he wasn’t quite ready either. She was too wrecked and too flushed and too full of the taste of him to work it out.
“I should go,” he said.
“Yeah.” She pushed her hair back off her hot face. “Probably.”
She walked him to the door. It was three steps in her little cottage, and she made it last as long as she could without admitting she was making it last. At the threshold he paused, filling the frame again, the dark garden and the darker manor beyond him.
He looked down at her, and she looked up, and neither of them said the sensible goodnight that would have ended it cleanly.
“Thank you for the coffee,” he said dryly, so dryly she almost missed it. The tiny half-smile curving his mouth was as imperceptible as always.
“You didn’t have any coffee.”
“No,” he agreed. “I didn’t.”
And then he bent, and kissed her again. She was almost sure it was meant to be a goodnight kiss, a brief press of their lips at the door, the kind of thing that closes an evening.
It didn’t stay that. It lasted exactly two seconds before it turned devastating.
His hand came back to her jaw and hers went to his collar and she rose up on her not-tall-enough heels to get closer.
The whole careful too fast, wait, I’m not ready argument she’d just made went down without a fight.
Then he broke the kiss and hugged her, both of them breathing hard, before he finally let her go and stepped back into the night.
“Goodnight, Maris.”
“Goodnight.”
She watched him go—a big quiet shadow crossing her garden to walk down the street and around the corner and back up the street to the mansion that was fifty feet away behind the wall.
She stood in her doorway with her hand pressed to her mouth as though she could hold the kiss there, and she didn’t close the door until he’d melted into the darkness.
Then she shut it and slid down against it until she was sitting on her floor in a green dress with her hands shaking and her heart going like she’d run for miles. She stared at her small kitchen and the counter where she’d almost thrown caution to the winds for the first time in six years.
Too fast, she’d said, and she’d been right.
But sitting there on her kitchen floor, still tasting him on her mouth, she wasn’t wondering whether she’d made a mistake by inviting him inside. She was wondering how long she was going to make herself wait before she did it again.