Page 23 of Suddenly Single
She laughed at his expression. “Don’t look so shocked.It happens all the time, doesn’t it? You meet some guy or girl and you think they’re great, and then after the glow wears off, and a few months pass and you’re like,anh,”she said with a dismissive shrug of one shoulder.“Or, I’ll meet a nice guy, and we’ll hang out as friends, and then I’ll start to believe that maybe there could be more between us, and then he’ll blow it by saying, ‘Hey, is your friend Vanessa seeing anyone?’”
She laughed again, but the laugh wasn’t as bright as before.It sounded almost bitter.
“Did you no’ just break up with someone?” Edan asked, confused.“Did you no’ say you were suddenly single?”
“I did. I am. That guy was bad news and I’m mad at myself because I knew it going in.” She leaned forward and looked into her wineglass, and for a moment, he thought perhaps she’d spotted a bit of cork floating about. “We were on thisjourneytogether,” she said quietly, making air quotes. “But the more I was with him, the more I was like,ugh.And then, to top it off, I caught him cheating.Like totallyinthe act.” She shuddered.
Her boyfriend sounded like the worst sort of bloke. Edan thought of Audra with Sean and felt a bit of a churn in his belly.Audra wasn’t cheating, but he supposed it was never easy to see someone you’d been with locking lips with someone else. “That sucks,” he said.
“Yep,” she said.“But I’m not too sad about it. It was for the best.Devin was more of a stop gap, really.”
“What does that mean, a stop gap?”
“I don’t know,” she said with a bit of a shrug. “I guess after I got laid off, and my dad announced he didn’t need me anymore, I didn’t really have any place to go, you know? Devin was the only one with a tangible offer.”
He glanced down, absorbing that.She was starting to make more sense to him.“I’ll be totally honest, Edan—I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she admitted. “I don’t know where I want to go or what I want to do.I need a plan, and I don’t have one yet.All I know is that I love it here.It’s so peaceful and calm and away from all that,” she said, gesturing to his door, as ifthatwas waiting for her outside.She swiped up her wineglass and drained it, put it down and said, “That’s my story.What’s yours?”
“My story is that I have a plan,” he said. The last thing Edan wanted to do right now with the day’s last bit of light shining in through the window was to talk or think about Audra.He shrugged.“I’m closing the inn and putting it on the market, then heading home.” He suddenly stood up, unwilling to discuss the reasons of his decision. “Might I offer you anything else? Crisps?”
“Curly fries?”
He frowned.
“Kidding! Sort of.” She stood up, too, and carried their glasses into the kitchen.The dogs, understanding there would be no scraps to fall off the table now, trotted out of the room.
“So this place is lonely for you,” she said.
He wouldn’t call it lonely, precisely.What he felt was distance—from the world. From life. “It’s fine,” he said, and turned on the water at the sink.
“Stand aside, captain.I’ll do cleanup. That was the deal.”
“I meant it as a joke.I’ll do it.”
She took the sponge from his hand. “Come on, you have to let me do the dishes,” she insisted.“You’ve fed me twice now.The least I can do is scrub your plates.”
“There no’ enough plates to make up for giving you a room,” he pointed out, and took the sponge back from her. She was standing so close that he could see flecks of gray in her crystal-blue irises.“You’ll be wanting to get back to something pressing, I suspect.A bath and a book.A real book. No e-reader for you.”
Her lips curved up in a smile of pure pleasure.“Yougetme.” She continued to hold his gaze, her smile soft.She had such bonny, mesmerizing eyes—
She suddenly rose up on her toes and before Edan understood what she intended, she kissed him.She kissed him with lips as soft as butter, her fingers silk on the stubble of his face.It was a sweet kiss, hardly a kiss at all, really, and yet Edan’s body responded like a bomb had detonated in him. He felt himself tumbling hard and fast down a path of desire, and alarmed, he lifted his head, his eyes locked with hers.
She looked so fucking alluring now, with the blush in her cheeks and her wet lips.She also looked stunned.Shewas stunned? He was floating somewhere between earth and God knew what.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” she said breathlessly, as if she’d read his mind.“I have no idea what got into me.I promise, I don’t go around kissing men willy-nilly—” She didn’t finish her thought because she grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him closer.Wine sloshed out of a glass he was holding and onto his pants leg as she kissed him again.Only this time, she kissed him so violently that he stumbled back against the kitchen counter, and Jenny came with him, her body pressed against his, her arms around his neck.He somehow managed to put one glass down and caught her around the waist.His mind shouted at him to push her away, but his body held onto her, anchoring her there, pressing against the length of her.Jenny nipped at his lips, swept her tongue into his mouth, shoved her fingers into his hair.
She bloody wellkissedhim.
Edan was quickly and dangerously aroused.It was as if a sleeping giant had been awakened, and his body was hardening with want. He swept his hand up to her breast, filled his palm with it, and Jenny moaned.
That small moan jolted Edan back to his senses.What the hell was he doing? He suddenly shifted back from her—which meant quite a backbend, as they were crammed up against the kitchen counter.
Jenny blinked with surprise at the abrupt end of the kiss.She stepped back and stared at him, wide-eyed, as she slowly ran the pad of her thumb across her lower lip.“That wascrazy,” she said in a whisper.“I can’t believe I did that.Edan, I don’t know what to say.I honestly have no excuse. I mean, you looked like you could use a kiss, but that gives me no right to justdoit without your consent.I’m ahugeadvocate of consent. I had this friend that—”
“Jenny,” he said, before she could launch into a story that would make no sense to him.
“Right. I apologize.”
The thing was, she didn’t look apologetic.She looked like she was only moments away from ripping his clothes off, and Edan was only moments away from allowing it.He cleared his throat. “I think you best go back to your room, aye?”
