by Serena Bell
She peered around him and saw what the noise had been. What he’d seen.
A small but noticeable crack had opened between the ledge and the house, in the expanse between them and the window. It was only a few inches long, but she could see a little bit of light shining up through it from the streetlamp below.
He took another backward step toward her, and sat beside her again. “I don’t think we’re in any danger. That said, I think we’d be best off waiting for someone to pass in the street and lift the ladder for us. Or we could call the fire department.”
Oh, God. She envisioned her whole street flashing with lights, clanging with sirens. “Can we wait a few minutes and see if we get rescued before we have to resort to that?”
He sighed. “If only I were as handy in reality as in my fantasies, we would still have the ladder right now.”
“There was ice. It could have happened to anyone.”
He flashed her a grateful expression. He was not as aloof or distant as she’d supposed. Right now he seemed almost accessible. Just a guy.
She wondered if Peyton would have thrown her a blanket. Found a ladder. Climbed up, dragged himself onto a ledge. Offered to sit and keep her company.
It was hard to picture. Of course, he wouldn’t have left her sitting there.
He wouldn’t have. Right? If they were strangers and he’d seen her up there, incongruous and shivering?
Was it insane to feel the tiniest bit lucky right now that her evening had gone the way it had? “This is not how I planned to spend Valentine’s Day,” she said, then realized it sounded like a complaint, when in fact she was relieved.
Peyton, I’d rather be stranded on a roof with a strange guy than out to dinner with you on Valentine’s Day.
It was all the revenge she needed, and a weight fell away.
“How did you plan to spend it?”
She took a deep breath.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t mind.” There was a point after which trying to save your pride no longer made sense. “But you should probably tell me your first name. I know your last name is Jenkins because it says so on your doorbell and your mailbox.”
“Dave.” He put out his hand for her to shake. It was warm and strong, and his fingers lingered a little longer than necessary over her wrist.
“I’m Molly.”
“So do I get my story now?”
“You see that shoe over there?”
“Yes.” Light seemed to dawn for him. “Does that shoe have something to do with your being out on this ledge?”
“I didn’t dress like this to sit out on the ledge in forty-five degree weather,” she said. “My boyfriend was supposed to pick me up and take me to Sergio’s, this new, see-and-be-seen restaurant in Cambridge, but he broke up with me instead. So I—” she hesitated. “So I threw a shoe.”
“Out the window?” he asked.
“I meant to throw it at the wall. The open window kind of jumped in front of my throw.”
“Your luck sounds even worse than mine. I was supposed to go to a Valentine’s Day eight-minute dating tournament. With elimination rounds. But it turned out they signed up one too many people, and they randomly drew my name to come on a different night.”
“Are you telling me you got stood up by speed dating?”
His mouth quirked. “It probably would’ve been a disaster anyway. I don’t know how I let myself get talked into it.”
She tilted her head. “I have to say, you don’t seem like the most likely candidate for speed dating. You aren’t the most talkative. It’s hard for me to imagine you blabbing for four whole minutes.”
“You might not be seeing my best side. I clam up around attractive women.”
She felt a flush of pleasure at that, reawakening the parts of her that had been stirred up earlier. “But you’re talking to me now. Does that mean you no longer find me attractive?”
“Hell, no. No danger of that.”
Oh, she liked that. She liked it all the way down to her toes, with some stops for more intense reflection on the way.
“The situation distracted me. But I’ll probably clam up again now that I’m sitting two inches away from you and—would I be way out of line if I said you smell amazing?”
That set off a chain reaction of sensation in her hyper-aware body—breasts tightening against the restriction of her impractical outfit, a surge of wet heat between her legs. Which—probably—he could smell. She should be embarrassed about that, but she wasn’t, not so much. She was pleased. The lotion and powder and makeup, all the self-inflicted pain in the name of beauty, had not been for nothing.
Before she could answer, a car turned up the street.
No!
Uh-oh. Good sense had abandoned her. She no longer wanted to be rescued. She wanted to sit on a possibly dangerous ledge wrapped in a blanket, panty-less, with this guy she didn’t know. Maybe she was in shock or her brain was too cold to function properly.
The car swerved to avoid the ladder, then sped onward.
“Huh,” he said. “I don’t understand some people. They see a ladder in the middle of the street, a potential hazard to traffic, and they don’t even stop to investigate?”
“You might be an unusually thoughtful person.”
“I don’t know.”
“You stopped to make sure I was okay.”
“I stopped to mock you for being on a roof in February.”
The almost-smile again. It occurred to her that if she could make him laugh, it might totally rock her world.
“When you discovered I wasn’t okay, you immediately started trying to fix it. You brought me a blanket. You brought me a ladder.”
“I dropped the ladder.”
“It slipped on the ice. Why won’t you let me give you credit for being awesome?”
He sighed. “I guess because it’s been a while since I thought of myself as awesome. I think of myself as—efficient. Business-like. Reasonably effective at my job. Creative at idea generation, savvy about risk. But ‘awesome’ seems like another league.”
“You’re in it, dude,” she said.
“It’s possible,” he said, “that there’s something about you that brings out my buried inclination to at least try to be awesome.”
Something winged skyward in the middle of her chest, and she felt bigger and better and wide open. Her heart beat hard, steady and demanding. “You wouldn’t—” She’d lost the moment before, but she wanted it back. “You wouldn’t be out of line at all. If you said I smelled amazing.”
He smiled. Really, truly smiled. It changed his whole face, lit him right up. It started a hot glow down deep in her, too.
“You smell amazing.”
He’d leaned a little closer to better breathe her in. Her breath caught. “You do, too.” Her voice seemed to have dropped away to a whisper.
“You know who I think is the unluckiest soul in all of this?”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend. Your ex-boyfriend. What an idiot. He could be sitting across from you in a great restaurant. I’m sitting next to you on a window ledge, and it’s still the most fun I’ve ever had on Valentine’s Day.”
More tightening awareness, as if the skin all over her body was as snug-fitting as her clothes.
“Are you warm enough?”
“I could be warmer,” she said.
“What can I do to help?” He leaned in close, so close she could feel his breath against her cheek. His lips slid, so slowly, barely perceptibly, down her jaw. “How’s this?”
“Warmer,” she breathed.
“God,” he muttered against her neck.
He was taking her apart, molecule by molecule, his breath and his lips and his tongue against her skin. She raised her chin to bare her neck, and he put his hand on her back, slid it up to her hair and tugged her toward him. His mouth met hers, warm and sure, a touch first—hello—then a long moment when his lips clung to hers and he made a r
ough sound in his throat—we’re really doing this. He coaxed her open and came on strong, his tongue stroking hers. He held the side of her face and turned his body toward hers, as greeting turned to need and need mounted to demand.
She whimpered.
He broke the kiss. “Make that noise again.”
“Kiss me again.”
He didn’t need to be asked twice. He kissed her and kissed her, exploring her, claiming her, quite possibly ruining her for all the rest of the kisses in the world. Certainly no one had ever kissed her like this before, or tasted so good, or held her head in that way that made her feel coddled and required at the same time. She whimpered obediently, and because she honestly couldn’t help herself.
He fumbled in the folds of the blanket, his hands moving roughly over the stretchy material of her dress, finding the tightly restrained curve of her breasts. If she’d known that being bound like this would intensify sensation this much, she would have turned it into her own personal kink years ago. Her nipples were small, hard, bumps buried layers-deep in fabric, but that didn’t stop Mr. Magic Fingers from finding the perfect formula for driving her crazy, nudging and pinching, rocking his thumb back and forth over both nipples until she moaned.
He stopped, abruptly.
“Um,” he said.
“We’re outside,” she said.
“Yes. On a ledge.”
“Call the fire department,” she ordered. “Tell them we need to get down from here, and quickly.”
He gave her a quick sideways glance. “Or they’ll have a real f—”
“Nooo. Don’t do it.”
“I don’t think I can help it. Seriously. Show me the guy who could restrain himself from making a bad fire joke in this situation. He doesn’t exist.”
“You know what? You’re probably right. I’m going to count myself grateful you didn’t make a hose joke.”
He smiled, generating a buzzy, alchemical response in her chest. “You should feel grateful.” He took out his phone, then hesitated.
“What?”
“They’re going to show up and get you down, and you’re going to fall in love with the handsome firefighter who rescued you and forget all about the guy with the blanket.”
“Um, not a chance. The guy with the blanket has my number.”
“Not literally, though.”
“You live downstairs.”
“We’ve managed to avoid conversation so far.”
She rattled off her number and he made her repeat it so he could put it in his phone. “Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll promise you hot chocolate once we’re both down from here safely. With Kahlua. And more of that thing you were doing. Oh, my God.”
He grinned. “One more kiss. Before we call.”
He licked her mouth first, sending a shower of shivers through her, then got her face in his big hands again and went to work until she was a whimpering, melted, useless heap of craving. She became aware that his hand was on her thigh, and that it was creeping upward. Some buried sentinel in her brain cried out a warning, which she ignored. He made a deep, dark sound of surprise and satisfaction and she felt his thumb glide through the wetness at the top of her thigh and tease against her curls.
It took a superhuman effort, but she pulled away. It was one thing to be kissing on a rooftop, but he’d discovered her secret, and if she let him play too much longer, she was going to be yelling all her secrets to the neighborhood.
“You’re not only not wearing big girl panties,” he said happily. “You’re not wearing any panties at all.”
“I hadn’t gotten a chance to put them on yet,” she lied.
“Do you always put them on after your shoes?”
She sighed.
“That’s pretty hot,” he said.
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’ve never done that before in my life. It was an act of desperation. I was hoping it would cause my sex life to be less lame.”
“Is it working?”
“Oh, hell yes.”
Something about this answer, or maybe the heat with which she uttered it, caused him to grab her and kiss her again, and this time he didn’t stop his hand at the crease of her thigh but slipped his fingers into her folds and found her clit. Oh, so the magic fingers didn’t only work on nipples? Good to know. Her hands had gone on a foray of their own and were clutching great handfuls of his wool sweater, implacable hard sections of his thigh, and finally, before she could think better of it—or of anything at all—the impressive bulge of his erection under his khakis. Oh, my.
“Call. The. Fire. Department.”
He laughed, a deep, gorgeous chuckle. She kind of doubted whether, when—not if—they finally fell into bed together, she’d take any more pleasure in his orgasm than she was taking right now in his laugh. It made him seem younger, buoyant, and she thought about how different people could be from who you thought they were, how months from now, maybe he wouldn’t be who he’d seemed tonight, either. But she’d have a damn good time finding out, in the meantime.
“Oh, someone’s coming!” she said, and then, “Oh, shit.” She drew back and wrapped the blanket tight.
Dave figured it out right away. “Your ex?”
“Yeah.”
“Well. At least he can help with the ladder.”
Peyton’s car pulled up to the curb and he got out. “Molly? What the hell—”
“Go away.”
“Wait,” Dave said. “Can you pick the ladder up, first?”
“Who are you?”
“Molly’s neighbor. Dave Jenkins.”
Peyton sized him up and dismissed him. “Molly, I want to apologize.”
“What happened to your Valentine’s Day date?”
“It was a disaster. It made me realize how much I like you. We have so much fun together. We’re so compatible.”
“Is he serious?” Dave asked.
Peyton was serious, the face she’d once thought so handsome now pleading and earnest. Had they had so much fun together? If so, why hadn’t he told her at the time, instead of chastising her for something he didn’t think she should have said, or for not being lively enough? And if they were so compatible, why hadn’t he shown up when he said he would, and why had he been so willing to dump her when the first alternative came along?
He might have been serious, but he was wrong, and he was a jerk.
And the sad thing was, she’d sold herself short to him, and she’d done it knowingly, for bad and stupid reasons. She’d been afraid of being alone or being childless. So she’d twisted herself in knots to please Peyton.
She wouldn’t make that mistake again. It had taken this, this crazy situation, to make her realize that. She didn’t need to be the life of the party because Peyton wanted her to be, and she didn’t need to make sure she said the right thing so she wouldn’t embarrass him. She didn’t need to wear really tight undergarments—unless they made her nipples feel really damn good. She didn’t need to buy expensive shoes. And she didn’t always need to be competent or sensible.
She needed to be herself. Her impetuous, shoe-throwing, stuck-on-a-roof, scared-of-heights self. Who by saying whatever came into her head whenever she decided to say it, could make this adorable, generous, modest, sexy man beside her laugh.
“He’s serious,” she told Dave. “Peyton, go away. You dumped me on Valentine’s Day.”
“Reiterating: Don’t leave without getting the ladder,” Dave instructed.
“I don’t want his ladder,” Molly said.
“I do,” Dave said. “Because it means we don’t have to possibly die getting back into your apartment.”
Peyton sized up the situation, then went and got the ladder and propped it up against the ledge. “There,” he said.
Molly eyed the ladder. And the ledge, with its ugly gap. And then she dropped the blanket and told Dave, “We’re going in through the window.”
Because the thing was, even if Dave didn’t care, she didn’t want Peyton to be the on
e who rescued her. She wanted to tell this story someday to her grandchildren, and when she did, she wanted to say, And then your grandfather climbed right up there on the ledge with me and rescued me, and I knew. I just knew.
Or, you know, at least to keep the possibility open. She wasn’t such an idealistic maniac that she was going to hang all her hopes on the fact that Dave would someday be the grandfather of her grandchildren, but there was no effing way she was going to let Peyton be the hero of this night.
“Thanks, Peyton,” she said. “But I think Dave had this covered before you showed up.”
She lunged for her Jimmy Choo and grabbed it securely. She crawled over Dave’s lap, not giving a shit if she flashed Peyton or the whole world with her bare ass or subjected her knees to the vicious surface of the ledge. She inched toward the window, and climbed inside, and then she held out her hand to Dave and he crawled in after her. The ledge creaked and shifted, but held.
“Now,” she said. “Where were we?”
He kissed her, long and deep, his arms tight around her, drawing her up against him so she could enjoy the feel of his erection against her hip. She shifted to take full advantage, and his arms tightened even more. Then he let her go and set her back. “I believe that you promised me hot chocolate with Kahlua? But I have another idea. How about we go find a place to eat and talk—somewhere other than that ledge. Then we go somewhere afterwards to get dessert and drinks, and talk some more. And then—provided we both still like the idea, we could—” He hesitated.
“Start fires and put them out with hoses?”
He chuckled again, deep, the best sound she’d heard in years. “I was going to suggest that we would say goodnight and happy Valentine’s Day.”
“You were not.”
“Well, something along those lines.”
She picked up her Jimmy Choos and slipped them on, grabbed her clutch purse and gave Dave her hand. “Hey,” she said.
“What?”
“Thank you. For rescuing me.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I know you think that,” she said. “And that’s probably my second favorite thing about you.”
“What’s the first?”
“I’ll show you later,” she said, and tugged him—laughing—toward the door.