After the chocolate had melted, they added eggs to the mixture and poured it into the warm crusts, returning the pies to the oven to bake just long enough for the filling to set.
Jess moved to the sink, and he shook his head. “Nope. There’s no way you’re washing all these dishes.” He put his hands on either side of her waist, intending to move her aside so he could take over, but she turned in his grasp, her mouth opening as if to protest. And then they were facing each other, bodies pinned together by the space between the countertops, her breasts pressing against his chest and her eyes dropping to his lips … and how could he do anything but kiss her?
She tasted like cream and sunshine, and the chocolate he’d seen her sneak before they’d melted the rest. His hand slid up her back and to her hair, steadying her as his tongue slipped past her lips, discovering even more sweetness. Her arms came around his neck, and he heard her hum in pleasure as her breath mingled with his.
He wanted to plunge into her warmth, bathe in her sweetness. Instead, he pulled back. As their lips separated, he heard her take a quick breath, and he winced. “I’m sorry. I should have asked.”
She was silent for a moment, and he could feel her breath moving against his chin. “You probably should have,” she said finally. “I would have said yes, though.”
“Thank God.”
She laughed and pushed on his chest to free herself. “I think you said something about washing these dishes.”
He shifted to let her slide away, immediately regretting the loss of her warmth. “Dishwasher, at your service.” He picked up the first bowl and turned on the sink as she went around the island to start putting away the ingredients they’d been using.
As he finished the last of the dishes, handing her the large bowl they’d made the filling in so she could dry it, the timer on the oven beeped gently.
“Think it’s done?” he asked.
“Let’s check.” She set the bowl to the side and opened the oven, pulling on the mitt so she could jiggle the pie pans gently. “Looks set. Let’s get them out.”
“Want me to—”
Jess already had the first pie tin in her hands. She set it on a trivet she’d pulled out while he was doing the dishes and went back for the other one.
“Those smell amazing,” he said.
“I know, right?” She grinned at him as she closed the oven with her heel. “How’s that for something different?”
“It’s certainly not apple fritters.” He placed his face directly above the pies to inhale the fragrant steam rising from the warm filling. “I may die before they’re cool enough to taste.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ll survive,” she said dryly. “Tell me about your friends, the ones we’re making these for.”
He turned and leaned against the counter to look at her. “Now I feel like I’m taking advantage of you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re helping me make dessert for people you haven’t even met, and I don’t think I can just bring you with me tomorrow night.”
She held up a hand. “Whoa, there.”
He stopped. “Whoa?”
“First of all, I’m busy tomorrow night, thanks for asking.” He winced at her tone. He wasn’t winning any points tonight. Where had smooth Sean gone? Down the drain with the alcohol, apparently. Who knew he’d turn out to be so awkward? Jess was certainly finding out quickly, that was for sure. “Second, we barely know each other. I don’t know how you usually do things—” Ouch. Point, hers. “—but let’s just, you know, take it slow. Okay?” She looked up at him, lips thinned but eyes patient.
He took a deep breath. “Yes. Okay. I’m sorry. You’re totally right. I’m not usually… I don’t know.”
“Inviting girls to meet your friends at the drop of a hat?”
“My friends have never even met any of the g—”
“Can you just… not finish that sentence?” Jess closed her eyes. “It’s pretty unflattering for both of us.”
He leaned forward and put his head in his hands, resting his elbows on the island countertop. “Oh, my God. I’m the worst.”
She chuckled—a warm sound that moved through his body like he’d just drunk hot cocoa in a snowstorm. “Not even close to the worst, trust me. But yeah, you’re not exactly batting a thousand, here.”
“Want to start over?” He looked up at her hopefully.
“Nope. I want to cut into that.” She pointed at the pie.
“That works.”
They took small plates with slices of pie on them into the living room, and Sean closed his eyes after the first bite. “This is really good.” He opened his eyes and inhaled most of the rest of the slice. It tasted a lot like the mole sauce he’d had at a tiny restaurant in L.A., but somehow also like a chocolate cream pie. “Insanely good.”
“I know,” Jess said. She’d eaten what appeared to be three small bites and set the rest aside. Before he could say anything, she smiled shyly up at him, and most of his thoughts vanished into the ball of want building in his gut. “Want to continue our conversation from before?”
“The one about how I’m the worst?”
She grinned shyly at him over the edge of his pie plate. “Not quite.”
He set his empty plate down. “Is it—earlier, should I not have…?” He trailed off, suddenly unsure of what he was asking or how he should ask it.
“Kissed me?”
He nodded. “You stopped me.”
She winced. “I did.”
“Did you not want—”
“No, no, I did! You took me by surprise, and I just…” She stopped and looked up at him, warmth in her eyes. “I do like the idea of kissing you.” She shrugged one shoulder as she held his gaze, a liquid movement that made Sean’s entire body go hot and then cold.
He leaned towards her, shifting so that their bodies aligned on the couch. “May I kiss you now?”
She nodded, and he let his hands drift into her glorious hair before pulling her gently towards him. He couldn’t remember feeling so tentative before. He didn’t want to hurt her or make her angry—he had no idea what type of guy he was now. What if he wasn’t good enough for her?
Their mouths met, and Sean let his worries slip away. She was sticky and sweet from the pie, and he let his lips roam around hers, gently licking his way in. She tasted like peace, and he craved it more than he’d ever imagined he would.
Chapter 8
Jess sipped her coffee as she waited for Marisol to walk through the door of The Hollow Bean. Unsurprisingly, her sister was late. What was surprising, though, was the fact that it had been Marisol who’d request they meet up this morning. Jess wasn’t typically a suspicious person, but with the way Marisol had been acting toward her lately, she could only surmise her sibling wanted something.
Briefly, Jess’s eyes fell to the small bag at her feet. Just in case, she’d brought samples of a new nail polish line, a charcoal face mask, and a candle made with essential oils that were supposed to calm you down.
A commotion on the other side of the room drew Jess’s gaze. She winced as she watched her sister muscle her way through the crowd, knocking into fellow customers without stopping to apologize. True, the tables in The Hollow Bean were arranged awkwardly due to a fireplace that bisected the middle of the room, but regardless, her sister’s disregard for others was rude. That’s just Marisol, Jess mused. Lord knew she’d been subjected to similar behavior her entire life.
With a dramatic sigh, Marisol dropped down into the seat across from Jess and eyed the coffee in her hand expectantly. “You didn’t order me anything?”
No hello. No how are you? Nothing.
Selfish and rude, Jess sighed inwardly. As usual. She kept hoping for something new, and Marisol never changed.
“I didn’t know when you were getting here, and I knew you’d complain if your coffee was cold.”
Marisol rolled her eyes. “I said I’d be here at ten.” She raised her arm and glanced dow
n at the watch on her wrist, a gift from their mother when Marisol had graduated from high school. “It’s only ten-oh-five.”
As subtly as she could, Jess dragged her left hand to the edge of the table and dropped it down into her lap. If Marisol saw her new Apple watch, she’d make a snide comment about it, and Jess didn’t much feel like fighting with her sister this morning. She was still floating on cloud nine from her date the night before with Sean.
And yet …
“You said you’d be here at nine-thirty, which I figured meant ten.”
“You’re crazy,” Marisol said, looking around for a waitress, even though she should know by now The Hollow Bean didn’t have any waitstaff. They’d lived close to River Hill their entire lives.
Jess sighed with resignation. “Do you want me to show you the text you sent, or will you take my word for it that I can read?”
Marisol reached into her purse and grabbed her phone. Jess watched her sister pull up their string of messages and knew the moment Marisol realized Jess was telling the truth. She dropped her phone back into her bag and turned to hang it on the back of her chair. “Okay, fine. I’m a few minutes late.”
Jess knew it was the only concession she was going to get, so she accepted it with a tight smile and decided to drop it. “So, what’s up?” Jess asked over the rim of her mug.
Marisol’s eyes flicked away guiltily as she launched into a story about Jason Junior needing something for school. Jess eventually stopped paying attention, and instead let her mind wander to everything she needed to get done that day, including putting together a video about a new henna dye her friend had used to disastrous effects. People really needed to know you should never use henna to color over hair that had been previously treated with dyes that contained metallic salts. The beauty industry might call them “shimmer agents,” but she knew better.
She also figured she’d spend an hour or two sitting at her desk silently wondering if Sean was going to ask her out again. He’d kissed her last night—and quite thoroughly—so Jess was counting the night before as a date. Even if they hadn’t explicitly called it that.
Now, just thinking about the way Sean had cradled her face in his large palms, and the gentle way he’d sucked her tongue into his mouth, had her stomach pitching and rolling. Her temperature spiked, and Jess felt her face grow warm. She raised her cup of coffee to her lips as Marisol continued speaking, hoping her sister wouldn’t notice the blush creeping up her neck to tint her cheeks a burnished shade of pink.
She and Sean hadn’t even reached second base but kissing him had been the single hottest experience of her life to date—and that included all the sex she’d had over the years. Okay, so there hadn’t been much sex to speak of lately, but still. When a kiss was more physically potent than making love with your college boyfriend, a girl could be forgiven for swooning.
Marisol snapped her fingers in front of Jess’s face. “Earth to Jess! Are you listening to me?”
She snapped back to the present. “I’m sorry, what?”
Marisol huffed. “I was telling you about a fundraiser at the boys’ school—”
“Right. Jason is selling something?”
Her sister rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why I even bother.”
Jess clenched her jaw and tried to go to her happy place. That usually meant envisioning floating down the river with her friends on a warm summer’s day, a bottle of Corona in her hand. Unfortunately, most of her old friends had gotten married and were raising young families or had moved away, so experiences like that were few and far between these days. But with the memory of Sean’s kiss still fresh in her mind, she thought she might be able to conjure a new happy place: the sofa in the living room of her cozy little cottage.
And yet, for all her attempts at recapturing the magic from the night before, with her sister glaring daggers at her and tapping her fingernails on the table in an irritating staccato beat, Jess failed to locate her inner Zen. Which really pissed her off. Couldn’t a girl have at least one day to bask in the bliss of a potential new relationship? Couldn’t her sister take five minutes to ask Jess how she was doing for once, instead of immediately launching into all the ways Jess needed to help her? Couldn’t someone be happy for her?
All at once, Jess snapped. “You bother because you know I’ll give you free stuff and you can pretend that you spent a fortune on it.”
Marisol’s mouth dropped open. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Do you realize that you didn’t even ask me how I’m doing when you sat down? That you never ask how I am?”
Marisol crossed her arms over her chest. “I did too.”
“No,” Jess said, pinning her with an angry glare. “You did not. And you never do. Just once, it’d be nice to tell you how things are going for me, instead of worrying about all the ways I need to walk on eggshells so that I don’t upset you with some perceived slight.”
“Fine! How are you?” Marisol barked, unconcerned that her voice echoed off the rafters of the coffee shop.
Jess set her cup to the side, debating whether or not she even wanted Marisol to know how she was doing. Whether her sister would find some new and inventive way to skew all the successes in Jess’s life into something that was somehow an indictment of the differences between them. But with girlfriends scarce these days, and a feeling of loneliness washing over her, she wished that she and Marisol had the type of sisterly relationship she’d read about. Perhaps she hadn’t done enough herself to foster that. Maybe if she only tried a bit harder to connect with Marisol, things could be different.
Her voice gentling, Jess said, “I got a job offer. A good one.”
Marisol’s voice dropped a few octaves too. “Something stable?”
Jess let the implied meaning of the statement slide. “It could be. One of the morning shows I’ve been a guest on a few times wants to have me on regularly.”
She hadn’t worked out all the details with the station yet, but it sounded like they wanted to have her to do two segments a week for the next six months. If she proved popular with their audience, there was room to expand her contract. Jess didn’t want to count her chickens before they hatched, but she knew how to connect with women in a way that made them feel good about themselves. The traffic on her blog didn’t lie. Data was data, and it proved that Jess was good at what she did. And her latest angle—real talk about beauty—was clearly resonating. Whether or not that translated into success with a live studio audience remained to be seen, but she was confident.
“Ooh, is that the one you did the segment with last week?”
Jess tried to tamp down her surprise. “You watched?”
Marisol nodded. “I was getting the boys ready for school, and it was on in the background. When I heard your name, I turned the TV up.”
Hearing that her sister had watched the segment thawed Jess’s heart. With two rambunctious boys, it couldn’t have been easy to get them out the door in the morning, but she’d set aside that time anyhow.
“It wasn’t my best showing,” Jess admitted, “but I think I turned it around in the end.”
Marisol laughed. “You looked terrible.” She reached for Jess’s coffee and drained the last of it. Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she made a face. “Ugh, mocha. I’m surprised. Don’t you need to watch your weight?”
Ouch.
There she was, the Marisol Jess knew and loved … despite her acerbic tongue.
“It’s my one indulgence,” Jess admitted as she stared longingly into her empty mug.
“Speaking of indulgences,” Marisol said, bringing Jess’s attention back to their conversation, “I have someone I want to set you up with.”
“You what?” Jess glanced around the coffee shop to make sure there weren’t any hidden cameras. Marisol had never tried to set her up with anyone. Mostly because she thought Jess was a stuck-up, no-fun, goody-two-shoes who couldn’t hold onto a man if her life depended on it. Jess had never had the pr
overbial balls to point out to her sister that Marisol was the one who’d been cheated on several times. She liked her hair way too much to do something that would result in a bald patch once her sister yanked a chunk of it out.
Marisol leaned closer. “I saw that segment, Jess. You’re beautiful, but you’ve lost your glow. You look like you need to get laid.” She beamed beatifically at her sister as though she’d delivered advice from the heavens.
Jess’s jaw dropped open. “I … My … How …” she sputtered, at a loss for words.
And just like that, her mind flashed back to the night before.
To the hungry look on Sean’s face as he’d eyed her bending over to fetch the pies from the oven. To the way he’d hummed low in the back of his throat as his tongue had licked its way inside her mouth. He’d tasted like chocolate and spice, like something decadent and forbidden. Jess clamped her thighs together to try and control the pulse beating in her core.
“I’m seeing someone,” she blurted.
“Really?” Marisol asked, her eyebrow raised in disbelief. “Then how come you look like you haven’t been fucked properly in years?” She cackled at her own joke.
For her part, Jess didn’t see anything funny about it at all.
The truth was, she hadn’t been fucked. Properly, or ever for that matter.
Just thinking the word had her squirming—and not necessarily in a good way. She didn’t fuck. She had sex. Or made love. Jess didn’t know what she would do if things got so hot and heavy that a man resorted to using words like that with her. No one in the history of ever had been so turned on that they’d looked at her and said something as brazen as “Get on the bed so I can fuck you.”
The thought of it was faintly nauseating.
And yet, she couldn’t deny that her pulse rocketed when she imagined Sean talking dirty to her. Telling her all the ways he wanted to be with her, his hips rolling against hers as he grunted out his release.
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