Page 26 of You Had Me at Chocolate

It would be very bad form to crow at that morsel of information so Jude did not. Outwardly. But on the inside, he was laughing hard. “I rest my case.”

“I remember you tried to reassure me in one of your letters that boys would still want to kiss me.”

“That’s because I knew how fourteen-year-old boy brains worked.” Hell, he’d have cut his mouth to ribbons if a girl with braces had been up for some first-base action.

“You would have kissed a girl with braces?”

“Are you kidding? I was a gangly redhead with giant ears; I would have kissed a girl who hadn’t brushed her teeth for a month.”

“Eww.” She laughed. “That is gross.”

Jude grinned. “That is teenage boys.”

Her laughter faded after a few beats and her gaze dropped to his mouth briefly and every cell in Jude’s body went on high alert.

“So why didn’t you ever try to kiss me?”

If Jude hadn’t been aware how close they were sitting before, he was now. Now Clementine was dissecting why they hadn’t made out when they’d been kids.

He shrugged. “Because we were friends. I didn’t… think about you like that.” He’d clearly been more of an idiot than Billy Marsh. “I didn’t think you thought about me like that either? Did you…” He knew he should probably be abandoning this topic but he didn’t seem to be able to stop, either. “Want me to kiss you?”

“Oh god, no.”

She didn’t recoil exactly but it was an emphatic rejection. Jude couldn’t figure out if he was relieved or annoyed.

“I’m just wondering why we never went there. I mean… I counted down the days until I could see you again and particularly during that last camp we were at that age where kids were suddenly looking at each other differently and yet we didn’t. And really—” She smiled. “We were practically engaged.”

Jude chuckled. “I counted down the days to camp, too,” he said. “It was such a… relief to get away from the tensions at home for those two weeks and you were part of that anticipation because you were just so easy to be around. You didn’t feel the need to talk all the time like so many girls I went to school with. If you had something to say, you said it. Otherwise, you listened. You were just so comfortable in your skin.”

He wasn’t sure Clementine wanted to hear a treatise on the complexities of their childhood relationship but it was stuff Jude hadn’t ever really analyzed until now.

“Maybe I didn’t want to mess with that? For damn sure, I would have screwed up any kind of pass.”

She smiled. “Nose bumping?”

“Definitely.” He nodded. “And teeth clashing. I had zero game.”

“How’s your game now?”

Jude’s pulse skipped a beat and he swallowed at the sudden intensity glittering in her eyes. Thanks to his celebrity, Jude had gotten pretty damn smooth pretty damn fast but… where the hell was this going? “I’ve… not had any complaints.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Care to prove it?”

A hot surge of what could only be described as lust flooded Jude’s veins. Hot and rich and demanding, wrapping sticky fingers around his gut, shooting flaming arrows directly at his groin. And if another woman had asked him that question, he’d have proven the fuck out of it, but this was Clementine and he found himself trapped between the thrum of desire and an abundance of caution.

Christ, why had he even opened the door to a kissing conversation? Dufus.

“You are drunk,” he said with a husky laugh, desperate to lighten the moment.

Slowly shaking her head, Clementine said, “Nope.” Then she drew an X over the left side of her chest. “Cross my heart.”

Dragging his eyes off her boob, Jude drew in a ragged breath, his brain scrambling between what he felt was the right thing to do in this suddenly weird moment and what he really wanted to do.

“I take it from your silence you don’t…” Her eyes drifted to his mouth and lingered for a bit before returning. “Want to kiss me?”

Jude’s pulsed accelerated as more heat flushed to his groin. Hell no. That would be entirely the wrong way to take it. He was just… torn. Between the boundaries Clementine had already drawn up and the demands of his libido. “I… wouldn’t say that.”

A smile lifted one corner or her mouth. “So… you do want to kiss me?”

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