by Melody Anne
Silence stretched between us.
I inhaled a ragged breath, pulled into the Shake Shack’s parking lot, and killed the engine. I couldn’t look at Seth, but I heard the ding as his door opened and then shut. So he was gone, then. I couldn’t say I blamed him, after that performance. Grant had been right: I wasn’t sexy, and I certainly wasn’t seductive. Case in point.
The pity party in my head was really starting to take off when suddenly my door opened and a hand came out of nowhere. “Come on.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure I said it out loud until his hand tightened around mine.
He pulled me out until I was standing in front of him. His eyes, holy hell, what was that look? The awareness was back. My skin tightened with anticipation. The desire I saw took my breath away.
Maybe I was wrong?
Please let me be wrong.
“I . . . fuck it . . .” A low growl came from his throat, and then his lips were on mine. I opened under them without thinking. His tongue plunged into my mouth, taking control without needing to ask.
My hands drifted up his arms until I could slide them around the back of his head. Wispy hair tickled my fingers and I tightened my grip, tugging his head closer. I whimpered in the back of my throat.
He groaned his approval into my mouth and pushed me back against my car. He was hard everywhere and held me in place with just the slight pressure of his body.
A few seconds later, he pulled back. I gasped for air. Seth moved his hand from behind my neck and over my jaw to stroke his thumb over my lips. I darted my tongue out, running it along the rough pad.
His sharp inhale told me all I needed to know.
He did want me too.
“God, you’re beautiful.”
I didn’t know what to say. Guys had told me that before, but not with that look in their eyes. Never quite with that level of intensity. A fresh wave of desire pooled in my gut.
“So is that a yes?” I whispered.
“For the record, I think it’s a very bad idea.” He leaned forward until our foreheads were touching.
“Why?” My voice was raw and it scratched against my throat. “We’re both adults. We both . . . want it? Right?”
I know I did, and I was pretty sure that the bulge pressing into my stomach meant he did too.
I forced myself to look into his eyes. His hand tightened on the back on my neck. “Fuck, we should have just done it the first night, and then maybe I could have gotten you out of my head.”
I wanted to jump up into the air and pump my fist like some Neanderthal guy. His admission made all the suffering worth it. He wanted me. He really wanted me.
“Seth?” I needed to hear him say it.
He groaned instead and closed his eyes. “You’re making this really hard, Avery.”
“Isn’t that the point?” I asked, nudging him with my hip.
He pulled his head back and then laughed. “God, you never say or do what I anticipate. You’re not what I expected at all. Come on,” he said, taking my hand, “you need a coffee milk shake to cool down. Then we’ll talk before either one of us does something insane.”
“Talk? That is so not what I meant, you know.” I gave him an exaggerated pout, and he swatted my ass.
I ordered my coffee shake and Seth had a double scoop of dark chocolate in a waffle cone. When I pulled out money to pay, Seth moved my hand aside. He pulled a crumpled twenty from his pocket and handed it to the girl behind the counter.
“I invited you. It’s supposed to be my treat,” I argued.
“I’m not letting you pay the very first time we go out together.” He took his change and turned toward the tables, completely missing the appraising look that the ice cream girl sent him.
I smiled at her, then joined Seth at a small table in the shade.
“She totally wanted you,” I said.
He barely glanced over at the take-out window. “Not my type,” he said around a mouthful of ice cream. It had started to melt a little already and he kept swiping his tongue around the edge to catch the drips.
I could not look away. My mind went there without any invitation from me.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said without even looking up. I’d never heard a guy growl his words before I met Seth. It should have sounded stupid, but damn if it wasn’t the sexiest sound ever. I’ll never laugh when I read that in a book again.
“Like what?” I took a long drink from my shake, trying desperately to rein in my thoughts.
“Like you want to be this fucking ice cream cone.”
Yes, please.
My gaze dropped back down to his lips. They had chocolate on them. God, I wanted to lean forward and lick it off.
“Avery.” The warning was heavy in his voice.
I forced myself to look up, into his eyes. They were heavy lidded and filled with hunger. Without breaking his stare, I leaned forward and swiped my tongue across the side of his ice cream.
“Mmmmmmm.” I loved chocolate on a good day, but something about tasting it while a hot guy like Seth watched made it so much better.
He couldn’t take his eyes away from my lips, and a surge of purely feminine power raced through me. I’d never teased Grant like this. He probably would have rolled his eyes and told me to grow up. He definitely would not have reacted the way Seth did.
“Damn it, Avery, we need to talk first.” But he still reached out and wiped his thumb along the corner of my mouth, then pulled it away and sucked it between his teeth.
Holy God. I was about to spontaneously combust at the Shake Shack.
Seth made short work of his waffle cone and balled up the napkin in his fist. “Okay, first things first. Do you have a boyfriend?”
My eyes went wide. “If I did, do you think I would have come on to you at O’Malley’s?”
Seth shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter to a lot of girls.”
“Well, I’m not that kind of person. I take commitment seriously.” I cringed at the sudden memory of Grant’s bare ass moving on top of that girl. Obviously I took commitment a lot more seriously than Grant had.
I looked up to find Seth watching me with a curious expression. “So you’re single?”
“Yep.”
“What happened?”
“What happened with what?”
“With the guy. It’s all over your face. You look like you ate some bad food or something.”
I guess I needed to work on my poker face if I wanted to be a kick-ass attorney. I sighed. “Typical story. Girl meets boy. Gives boy four years of her life. Boy sticks his dick into another woman. Girl trashes boy’s truck. Girl gets community service.”
He whistled. “That’s pretty bad-assed. Wouldn’t figure you for the destruction of property type. So the dickhead actually pressed charges? That’s a douchy move considering what he did.”
“Right?” No one but Shari understood why that had pissed me off more than finding Grant naked with another woman. Him cheating should have been like my get-out-of-jail-free card. He cheats. I screw up his truck. We call it even.
“And that’s why you’re with us every weekday between six and two?”
“That and fifteen thousand restitution.”
“Holy fuck. Remind me not to piss you off. Although to be honest, if you trashed my truck, you might get a hundred-dollar fine.” He grinned at me. “So when you’re not destroying property, what do you do?”
“I’m in senior year at UNC. Well, technically I’m taking a semester off right now for CS, but I’ll still graduate this year.”
“What are you majoring in? Wait, don’t tell me, let me guess.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples. When he scrunched up his face in mock concentration, I laughed. His eyes popped open and he snapped his fingers. “Okay, I got it. Auto body repair.”
I snorted out a sharp laugh. “I don’t even know how to check my oil, much less repair something on a car. Good guess, though. It could be a lucrative caree
r choice given my past.”
“Well, I know you’re not a dancer, so given that you are such a bad ass, I’m going with lion tamer. Final answer.”
“God, you suck. I’m going to sound completely boring now when I tell you what I’m actually studying. Maybe it’s not too late to switch my major. Lion tamer has a nice ring to it. And people always threaten to run away and join the circus, so it must be fun.”
“But then you’d get hit on by the two-headed man, and that would just be awkward. What if you liked one head but not the other? How would you be alone for some quiet time?”
“Earmuffs and a blindfold, of course,” I said without missing a beat.
“For which one?” he asked with a huge smile.
This verbal foreplay that had nothing to do with sex was turning me on. This side of Seth, the goofy laid-back one with the panty-dropping grin was very dangerous. Much more than broody bad boy Seth.
I needed to catch my breath. “I’m prelaw. I’ll be starting law school in the fall. I haven’t decided which one yet, though.” My father expected me to pack up and go to Harvard, had already pulled those strings my freshman year, but I was undecided. I liked UNC, and they had a really good program there as well. Which I’d applied and been accepted into, but my father didn’t know that yet.
Seth pushed to his feet and held his hands out in front of him. “Whoa, hold on. You’re telling me that you’re going into law and you broke the law? Didn’t they cover property destruction in like, Law 101? Were you asleep in that class?”
“Oh, it gets better. My father is one of the best attorneys in the city. He tried to get the charges dismissed, but there was a small problem. Someone uploaded a video to YouTube.”
“Please tell me it was a sex tape?” Seth said.
The half-hopeful, half-pleading look on his face undid me. I could not stop laughing. “It was not a sex tape,” I said between gasps for air. “But it was me, beating the shit out of Grant’s truck. Couldn’t really deny it at that point. My father was so pissed.”
“And the rest is history,” he said.
“Pretty much.” I stood up and sucked the last dregs of my milk shake through the straw, then Seth took it and his garbage and threw it away. My eyes were glued to his ass as he walked away from me, and I didn’t realize he had turned around until he cleared his throat loudly.
Busted.
“Not like I don’t see it every day,” I said with a casual shrug.
Seth raised his eyebrows and stalked toward me. “Are you telling me that you have been checking out my ass every single day for two weeks?”
I walked right into that one. “Maybe.”
He stopped only a step away, but didn’t make any other move. His gaze kept dropping to my lips, and I licked them unconsciously. The flare of heat in his eyes before the black seemed to eat away most of the color made my knees weak.
I didn’t want today to end, but I’d already put it out there that I wanted to have sex with him. Wasn’t going to happen again. If he wanted me, he had to make the first move.
Yet he stood perfectly still, just watching me.
“I’m probably going to lose my man card for saying this, but I’m glad we didn’t have sex that first night,” he said finally.
“Wow, way to make a girl feel special,” I said.
“Because,” he said, taking that last step and closing the distance between us, “it would have happened and we would have gone our separate ways and we wouldn’t be here right now. I didn’t want to like you, Avery. Hell, I didn’t like you after that night at O’Malley’s, but you’re not what I expected.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I asked a little breathlessly.
“Yes. No. I don’t fucking know.” He drove his fingers through his hair and looked past me. “I’ve got so much shit sitting on my shoulders right now that I can barely stand up, but you’re like this light I can’t stay away from. My life is a mess and I don’t have a lot to offer anyone, much less someone like you.”
“Someone like me? In case you haven’t noticed, Seth, I’m right there beside you every day stabbing garbage . . .”
“Wearing your designer clothes and driving a Beemer. Come on, Avery, we both know that as soon as this is over, you go back to your real life. This will just be a blip on your radar. An inconvenience.” He finally looked me in the eyes, and I saw the pain he was trying to hide. “You’re looking for a distraction, and I get it. Hell, I’d be up for it if I wasn’t holding on by a thread here. If we got involved, even for a few weeks, it would not end well.”
His rejection hurt. A lot. Especially after the last half hour. I pulled every ounce of self-preservation I could find inside myself and nodded.
“So we should probably get back so you’re not late for your check-in with your parole officer.” I pushed open the door and walked into the suffocating outdoors without waiting for him to follow.
Halfway to the car, Seth stopped me with a hand on my arm. “Avery.”
God, he was the king of mixed signals. The longing in his voice pierced through my thin layer of control like it was nothing. To survive the next six weeks, I’d have to keep away from him. Far away. Starting right now.
“I get it. It’s okay. But really, we need to go. I don’t want you to miss your appointment.” My voice sounded neutral, and I gave myself a mental high five. I made it to the car by taking steady, even breaths with each step. One car ride and then I could go home and wallow in self-pity and rejection. And wine. Lots and lots of wine.
“Damn it,” Seth exhaled. His hands were on my shoulders and he spun me around, leaning his hips against me, pressing me against the car again. “You don’t get it at all.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath in. When he opened them, the want in them nearly sent me to my knees. He leaned in so close I thought he was going to kiss me. “A few weeks would never be enough,” he said against my lips. “If anything more happens between us, I won’t be able to walk away and forget. We haven’t done anything except kiss, and I can’t get you out of my fucking head. If we have sex . . .” Seth shook his head.
“What if I don’t want you to walk away?” The whispered question slipped from my lips before I even knew what I was saying. Was that what I wanted? Wasn’t it way too early to think about getting involved with someone else? I’d just gotten out of a four-year relationship.
But I hadn’t expected to meet Seth. Or to like him this much after I did.
He groaned. “You don’t even know me. Christ, I just got out of prison, you should be running the other way.”
There was only one thing I really needed to know. One thing that would be a deal breaker. “Were you selling drugs? Is that why you were there?”
He reared back and anger flashed across his face. “Fuck, no.”
Before he had a chance to get any farther from me, I curled my fingers in the loops of his jeans and brought him back against me. “That’s all I needed to know. The rest, well, I think you should take a chance. On me. On us.”
“I don’t have a fucking thing to offer you. I can’t give you fancy dinners or expensive jewelry. I’ve got a rusted-out truck and about two hundred dollars to my name. That’s it. That is me.” He tried to move away, but I kept a tight grip on him.
“And that’s who I like. I’ve had the country club and cocktail parties, and you know how that ended. I’m tired of doing what everyone else wants me to. This, between us, is the first thing in my life that I’ve wanted just for me. I don’t even know what I’m doing here . . .”
Seth’s arms were around me, and his lips took mine in a hungry kiss. I opened under the assault as he devoured me, stroking the inside of my mouth in frantic slashes of his tongue.
I groaned and wrapped my arms around his waist.
The out-of-control feelings returned a hundred times more powerful. I ran my hands under his T-shirt, up over the hot skin of his back. His growl vibrated my mouth and the kiss deepened.
He pressed his hips again
st me.
I rocked against the hardness in his jeans.
After several more minutes of forgetting my own name, Seth pulled back and rested his forehead against mine. His eyes were practically glowing, and under the desire, there were hints of vulnerability. “I don’t know what the hell this is, but you’ve got me, Avery. For however long you want me.”
My heart lurched in my chest.
“Will you come over tonight?” I held my breath, waiting for his answer. “I’d like to make you dinner.”
He kissed me again, only this time it was teasing and gentle. His hand curled around my jaw and he stroked his thumb over my kiss-swollen lips.
“The fucking zombie apocalypse couldn’t keep me away.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Seth
Avery’s place was crazy nice.
I gave her the flowers I picked up at the corner market, because I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was supposed to do. It had been a long time since I’d been on a date, and high school Seth had never thought to buy flowers.
“They’re beautiful,” she gushed. The bouquet of white daisies and pink carnations was probably the lamest gift she’d ever gotten, hell, it was the last bunch at the Stop ’n’ Go. Heat climbed up my neck. Shit, I should have just brought a six-pack.
That was me.
“Come in.” She made her way to the other room, then came back a few minutes later with the flowers in a vase that probably cost more than my mother’s trailer.
What the fuck am I doing here?
I looked around her place. The high ceilings, crown molding, and hardwood floors were right out of a showroom. She told me she shared the place with Shari, aka Bambi, who was back living on campus now. They had a huge white leather sofa parked in front of a flat-screen TV. There was a big window at the end of the room that looked out over some kind of brick courtyard with benches and gardens and shit.
It was filled with bright natural light, and everything fucking gleamed.
“Christ,” I muttered. I thought it was a decent place to live from the outside, but seeing this was almost too much. I swallowed back the discomfort that started when I had to be buzzed through the security gate after the guard checked to be sure my name was on the list.