Page 64 of Take Me Home

He gave her name gravity. The effect on her was the opposite, floaty, heady.

“If I’m being totally honest, it’s not a new thing for me. At the café…” He gave a single-shouldered shrug, one corner of his mouth lifting. “But it never stopped me from pouring your coffee. We can have this…” He rolled his wrist, indicating a back and forth between them.

“Attraction?” she supplied.

“Yeah. Which I’m hoping is mutual?”

“It is.” Her voice came out thready. She cleared her throat, tugged her suddenly itchy sweater collar from her neck.

“Christ, between your little off-the-shoulder number and now that,” he said, pointing accusingly, “I’m going to develop an unhealthy fixation on your neck.”

After the last few days of dancing around it, she hadn’t expected him to come right out and state his attraction to her. It was almost businesslike, this clarifying of terms and conditions, and yet there was still a charm to the way he seemed to have abandoned being cool or coy. Her heart felt like a shaken-up Coke can.

“Anyway.” He closed his eyes as if trying to refocus. “What I’m trying to say is: it can be a physical thing without changing anything else, whether it’s just the one time, or only while we’re here, or whatever.”

He placed a set of bracelets onto a square of paper and folded the edges around it, so casual, like he’d just offered her the muffin of the day at the café rather than…what, exactly?

“Friends with benefits?”

Ash didn’t look up from his wrapping. “I wouldn’t even call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“Just…Okay, so, we can kiss if we both want to. We can stopwhenever. You don’t have to worry that I’ll get attached. I won’t ‘get weird’ and make you avoid the café.” She heard the air quotes he put aroundget weird, his mildly sarcastic recall of what she’d said when they’d agreed to carpool home.

Her stomach went oddly leaden at how easily he brushed off the prospect of an emotional attachment. “We already agreed that if thingsget weird, I’m not avoiding anything. I get the café.”

He smiled, an amused, genuine smile that broke a little bit of the tension. “Sure. And since I live and work there, you can trust that the very last thing I want is for anything between us to get complicated.”

Hazel narrowed her eyes. “Just physical. And you can do that, Mr. Still Goes Out with His Ex and Her Fiancé?” Why did she want him to admit that it would be a struggle, that he didn’t really feel so cavalier about her? When he’d kissed her at the bar, pressed his entire frame against hers, she’d felt like she was bursting at every edge of herself. A supernova.This is what I wanted, he’d said, and it had felt like a door opening.

“You want me to put it in writing or something?” He raised his palm. “I, Ash Campbell, swear not to catch feelings from making out a few times with Hazel Elliot.”

“A few times, huh?” She settled back against the bed, smiling despite her nagging unease. Itwouldbe easier to know they could act on their attraction without complications. If they were straightforward with each other, if they established clear boundaries, wasn’t that better than this wild attraction driving them to do something reckless and messy?

Yet she couldn’t help but think of seeing Franny after all this time, how avoidance had made her lock their friendship in a box and throw away the key. All this time they might have had, all this loneliness Hazel had been drowning in since…well, beforeSylvia even moved away. If she hadn’t run into Franny tonight, she never would have realized that maybe burying the past and avoidance weren’t her only options.

Ash drew up onto his knees and prowled across their wrapping area, crinkling the paper under one hand and then the other as he leaned in, a cute, playful smile on his lips. “A few make-outs. A thousand. Whatever you want.” He waited for her to tilt her chin up to him, then brushed his lips softly across hers.

Threading her fingers into his soft curls, she tugged and deepened the kiss. He fell on top of her, right into the open V of her legs, the paper underneath him surely getting destroyed beyond use. She didn’t care. When he dropped his lips to her neck, all thoughts beyond their bodies and how good his mouth felt flew right out of her head.

His warm, broad palm slid around to the middle of her back, pressing so she arched into him. They were at awkward angles, his other hand propped on the bed behind her shoulder, his body still too far above her, up on his knees. She had nowhere to go, boxed in by the bed, and as far as she arched, she couldn’t get the contact she wanted. They expelled frustrated sighs at the same time, and he sat back on his heels, ran a palm down his face. “Haze,” he said, half agonized and half laughing. The nickname zinged through her.

Bed.Bed, now, she thought, the rest of her vocabulary beyond grasp. She wanted to unbuckle his belt and shove his jeans down, wanted to wrap her legs around his waist and koala-hug him, let him palm her ass and lift her up. To fall onto the bed, finally bearing the full, satisfying weight of him on top of her.

His eyes danced back and forth between hers, reading her, debating. Just when he seemed to have settled on a decision and his hand ran down to the curve of her butt, a muted thud came from the hall, followed by a hissed, “Shh.”

Ash’s hand paused. “Someone there?” he called hoarsely. More shushing came, then a louder, indignant little girl’s voice, accusing, “You walk too loud, Aunt June.”

He groaned. “I’m taking their gifts back for interrupting this.” He tucked Hazel’s hair behind her ear, then rocked back on his heels and went to the door.

When he flung it open, June and Cosette thudded loudly down the stairs, shrieking. Then came Maggie’s voice, laughingly admonishing June for setting a bad example.

“I’m keeping you from your family,” Hazel said as Ash tried to smooth the mangled wrapping paper. “We should go down there.”

“Yeah, just—” He licked his lips, his eyes still heavy-lidded with want. “Give me a few minutes.” His eyes dropped, and hers followed, landing squarely on the bulge in his jeans.

That he was still very turned on made her want to go again. She swallowed. “Good idea.”

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