Page 39 of Hang the Moon
She’d watched enough movies, listened to enough of her friends moon overmagicalkisses. She’d rolled her eyes at descriptions of toes curling and breaths being snatched, ofdrowningin someone, that made it sound like a great time. Of hearts galloping like the hooves of a hundred wild horses and colors flashing prismatically behind closed lids. She’d laughed at how two people pressing their mouths together couldeverbe described with the sort of near-orgasmic passion that usually required she have her pants off.
She could say with certainty she’d had plenty of nice kisses in her life—a few god-awful ones, too—but nothing that lived up to the hype. Kisses, usually, were perfunctory. What you did before you got to the good stuff.
But kissing Brendon? This was a revelation. All those clichés? They didn’t hold a candle to the way his lips turned her body into a living, breathing live wire of sensation.
His tongue snaked out, flirting with the tip of hers, and—holy fuck. She fisted his shirt, pulling him closer, before sliding her hand around the back of his neck and tangling her fingers in his short hair, tugging hard like a tiny part of her had wanted to do since their first dinner.
He hissed into her mouth and dragged his palm up her waist, dancing his fingers along the ladder of her ribs and over, skimming the thin skin of her inner elbow, her forearm. His fingers wrapped around her wrist, her pulse fluttering wildly inside her veins as he tangled their fingers together and pinned her hand against the door beside her head, a move that made her back bow.
He tore his mouth from hers and pressed his lips to the curve of her jaw. Her breath caught in the back of her throat when his teeth grazed a particularly sensitive spot on her neck, and she raked her nails over his scalp, hiking her thigh up his hip, her heel pressing into the back of his leg.
“Annie.” He panted against her throat, the gravel of his voice making her whimper.
Down the hall, a door slammed, the reverberation of wood on wood making her pulse leap.
Brendon chuckled quietly against her throat and pressed one last kiss to the hinge of her jaw. “Wow.”
“Uh-huh,” she said dumbly, having passed discombobulated at the first brush of their mouths. Air gusted from between her tender lips as she struggled to catch her breath.
She didn’t do this, lose herself in kisses to the point where everything else faded away and she forgot where she was.Whoshe was. Who she was kissing.
She screwed her eyes shut. “This was a bad idea.”
His breaths were almost as noisy as hers, the only sound that filled the hall before he cleared his throat. “Annie.”
She cracked open her eyes.
“It sure felt like a fantastic idea to me.” His smile was infuriatingly smug, like he was confident he could convince her this was a good idea. As if it were simple.
She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to kiss the smile off his face or smack him.
“I’m not the person you want me to be. I—we’re not looking for the same things.”
His mouth turned down at the corners. “You’re telling me you’ve never stumbled across something great? Maybe you weren’t looking for it, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to you? Don’t you think that’s possible? That sometimes we just get lucky?”
For some people, maybe.
But in her experience, if something seemed too good to be true, usually it was.
Everything he’d said sounded dreamy, but she’d been disappointed too many times to let her feelings get the better of her when she knew this wasn’t smart. She knew better. “Even if any of that were true, I don’t live here.”
The most damning argument of all.
Brendon’s throat jerked before he gave a quiet laugh. “What’s three thousand miles?”
Everything?
His determination was as sweet as it was bound to be short-lived. No one she’d ever dated had been able to handle her traveling two weeks out of the month. And it wasn’t just three thousand miles.
“Brendon.” She lifted her hand to rest it against her breastbone, fingers splayed against the front of her throat. Her pulse pounded in her neck, her heart still hammering away. “It’s a lot more than that.”
His shoulders rose and fell, just jerky enough to show that hedidn’t feel as nonchalant about this as he was pretending to be. He bobbed his head. “I know your job—”
She shook her head. “You don’t know.” She hadn’t wanted to do this, talk about this, but she had no choice. “I’m moving. To London. There was a promotion and I—I start in July.”
He opened and shut his mouth, clearly at a loss for words.
Her stomach soured. “I really hope you find what you’re looking for. But I’m not it.” She reached back, her fingers curling around the doorknob. “Please don’t tell Darcy. I want to tell her in person.”
