Page 55 of The Thing About My Rival

“I kissed you back and put my hands under your shirt too.” A coy smile lifts one corner of her mouth. “You have a lot of muscles.”

She liked it. Excellent. “Then what?”

“Then you lifted me up and set me on a shelf.”

Jesus Christ, this is torture. I should back off, climb out of this deep pond of trouble. But I can’t. I can’t help myself. I can’t stop myself from wading in deeper. “Did you wrap your legs around me?”

She looks down and nods.

I rub my hand around the back of my neck and dig myfingers hard into the taut tendons. I was lucky enough to have this woman’s legs gripping my waist and I don’t fucking remember it. “Tell me what I did then.”

“You started kissing me…here.” She draws a line down the side of her neck.

Well, shit. My mouth really has been on that birthmark.

Her finger continues its journey across her collarbone, then moves over her sweatshirt and down between her breasts.

Holy fuck. Mr. Happy completes his journey northward. And there’s no hiding it in track pants—she must be able to see it.

But how did my pants get unzippered that night? Tom said he had to do them up. So how the hell did that happen?

“And when I…did that”—my gaze settles on where her finger still rests, right between her breasts—“what did you do?”

Even from this angle I can tell she’s focused on my heaving groin.

“I undid your jeans.”

I might be about to shoot my load right here, with roughly a foot between us and not a finger on each other. Is this tantric sex or something?

“Why?”

Silence. Is that because she doesn’t know the answer? Or because she doesn’t want to admit the reason?

Her chest rises with another long, deep breath. Then falls with an equally long, slow exhale. “Because I wanted you.”

Heat trickles down the inside of my ribcage. Christ, the competition for the sexiest sentence in the English language is high tonight.

If we didn’t work together, I’d grab her right now, hoist her up on the bar and bury my face between her legs.

But we do.

So I ball my hands into fists inside my pockets and try to ignore Mr. Happy’s extra happy twitches. “Then what happened?”

Finally she looks up. But her gaze halts at my lips. I can’t help but lick them, to put on a show for her.

And she watches.

My perfect audience of one watches my tongue work my lips as she talks. “My backside knocked a plastic bottle of something off the shelf. It hit you in the leg. You stumbled back and grabbed the door handle, and the door flew open and you fell out.”

And it comes back to me. My hand reaches for that spot, feeling it again now, the whack of the heavy container of liquid on the outside of my left thigh. Why the fuck can I remember whatthatfeels like, but not what it’s like to have my mouth on hers, on her neck, between her breasts?

Mr. Happy aches at the thought that she came so fucking close to touching him.

“Then that was that.” Her voice is soft and tinged with regret.

But is that regret because we didn’t finish it? Or because it shouldn’t have started in the first place?

“Probably a good job it ended there,” I say, testing the water.

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