Page 17 of College Boy

Chapter Eleven

Emma

“Howdy, neighbor.”

Mitch glanced up from where he sat on the pool deck, trilling bare feet through the shallow end. He looked radiant in the moonlight, long, lean, and seeming younger than ever. She’d never wanted him more than at that very moment, which was really saying something since she’d wanted him, deep down inside (and everywhere else in her body, for that matter), since the first time they’d laid eyes upon one another.

“Sup?” he asked casually, belying the way his whole body had jerked upon hearing her voice.

“Not much,” she muttered casually, as if she hadn’t been pacing the entirety of her big, sprawling, lonely ass house since the minute she’d left him, looking ridiculous but sexy while draped over the too-small BMX bike in the street. “You?”

“You’re looking at it,” Mitch insisted, voice low and taut above the sound of ripples spreading from the water that surrounded his big, pale feet.

“No party games tonight?” Emma murmured, admiring the spacious pool deck and finding it conspicuously empty of half-naked revelers sucking rot gut tequila out of each other’s pierced belly buttons between raiding the pool house fridge for beer cans to crumple against their foreheads.

Mitch shook his head, hair still shaggy and rumpled from their beach shower earlier that day. “They all took off for some music festival down in South Florida,” he explained, rising easily until his bare feet dripped on the damp pool tiles.

Emma felt a stirring beneath the casual wrap dress she’d thrown on to drift next door, silken and smooth against the bare, flushed skin underneath. “So what have you been doing all night?” she asked, absently pressing her damp loins against the back of the waist-high door on her side of the fence.

“Waiting for you to show up looking like that,” he teased, tossing a towel casually over one bare shoulder and approaching, panther-like, hips swaying so that his baggies slithered up and down his narrow hip bones.

Emma paused to admire the show, drinking him in like a fine wine as she grew drunk on his unmistakable youth and firm, vibrant flesh. “And if I hadn’t?” she finally croaked.

Mitch glanced over his shoulder at the big, sprawling house behind him, then in the other direction at the slim but stylish pool house across from it. “Find somewhere awkward and uncomfortable in there to sleep,” he sighed, big fingers wrapped around the fence posts on either side of her. “Since Reggie banished me from the big house while he and his pals are away.”

“What? That little shit!”

Mitch chuckled easily, seeming uber casual despite the late hour and sudden homelessness. “My sentiments exactly.”

Emma had been in the pool house before, during some Memorial Day cookout or other, as she recalled. “There’s nowhere for a big, strapping boy like you to sleep in there.”

“Alas,” Mitch sighed, body heat radiating off of his lean, pale chest in waves that crashed upon her own deliciously. “Why do you think I’m up at this ungodly hour?”

Emma merely nodded, mind working through a dozen different saucy scenarios as his long fingers lingered just beside her own. “What’s your excuse?” he asked, eyes penetrating in the deep dark of night.

Emma nodded, as if to herself, no longer able to deny her craven desires or the way her body was responding almost uncontrollably to each and every one of them. “You, silly,” she murmured, easily unlatching her fence door and stepping cautiously aside, an unspoken invitation she hoped he’d notice. “I can’t let you sleep on some random deck chair, Mitch.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, fiddling with the latch on his side to open his door of the neighboring fence. “But you didn’t know that when you came over here tonight.”

Emma blushed and waved an impatient hand. “Do you have to notice every little thing?” she blurted as he inched slowly onto her property line, pale feet crunching on the soft spring grass. “Can’t you just ignore the fact that I came over here in the middle of the night just to gaze at you in the pool?”

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