She felt her face grow warm again and resisted the urge to say, ‘Just this one.’ “We can play it by ear.”
“And since you’re worried about sex—”
“I am not worried about sex,” she said, interrupting him. “I’m just concerned that …”
“Yes?” Will prompted, oblivious to the obscene way he was sucking on their dessert cherry topper.
“I am just concerned—stop sucking that—I am just concerned that we’ll do it and then I’ll get bored.”
“Bored with me?” he asked, brows raised in surprise.
“Yes.”
He smirked. “Not possible.”
“That’s an arrogant thing to—”
“I mean it,” he said, laughing quietly. “People get bewildered, confused, aroused, amused, and irate with me. But never bored. I promise I’ll keep you interested.”
She contemplated the way his tongue flicked out to lick the ice scream on his lower lip. “It’s true that since we met, you’ve pretended to be a sex addict, jumped me in a dark theater, let me jump you in a dark pub, and blackmailed me with my own purse.”
Nearby, an old lady dropped her fork in horror.
“I can’t take credit for all of that, but aye, exactly,” he said, grinning.
Ten minutes later, they were asked to leave for having an ‘unsuitable’ conversation in a family restaurant.
“See?” Will said as they stood on the sidewalk, debating what to do with themselves. “Interesting.”
He beamed, and Leah laughed at the absurdity of it.
Since neither of them seemed to want to end the night early, Leah nodded in the direction of the small playground just a block down the street.
“Let’s walk,” she said, and they fell into step alongside each other. They were close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. She wanted to turn her palm and take his hand. She didn’t.
He did though. His long fingers laced through hers and lightly squeezed.
“Thank you,” he said, “for seeing me again.”
She rubbed her thumb along the side of his palm. “Like you said, the addiction thing was the only lie. And … I don’t know. I’ve had time to think about everything. For some reason, I trust you.”
“I’m glad. And I’ll be sure to give you plenty of reasons.”
She smiled down at their feet, watching the sidewalk with its cracks and holes pass underneath. A minute later, Will pulled her off toward the empty playground. A set of swings and a complicated jungle gym with three types of slides sat in the middle of a wood-chipped area. Just outside the wood chips, a steel bench was parked for parents to observe their children.
They sat at the bench, Will pulling her close enough that their sides touched. She thought of that couple at the library and smiled again as she shifted even closer, pressing into his side. He put his arm around her shoulder, enveloping her in warmth and the earthy scent of his soap.
“Will,” she said. Her cheek rested against the side of his neck, and she turned her face, closing her eyes against his skin. “I feel like I should warn you I’m not very good at relationships.”
His arm tightened around her. “Guess that makes two of us. But I’m optimistic we can learn.”
“But I mean …” She drew back just far enough so she could see his face. The tender way he smiled down at her made her chest ache. “I can’t promise that I won’t freak out on you again later on.” She looked away. She had to make him understand what he was getting into. “And I can’t promise that any of this will last, or that my feelings won’t change, or—”
“Leah.” His thumb skimmed her bottom lip, and her tongue tripped on her words. Her throat went dry. “I’m not asking you for any of that. You’ve intrigued me from the moment we met, and all I want is for us to give this a chance.”
“Why?”
He gave her a lopsided smile. “Why do I want to give this a chance? Well, there’s the issue of me being completely infatuated with you, and—”
“No, that’s not …” She lowered her head back against his shoulder with a small smile. Her cheeks were beginning to hurt from all the smiling. She’d have to get used to this. Or just slap herself a couple times. “Why did I intrigue you?”
“Because you were a contradiction. And beautiful. And because you called me disgusting.”
She laughed. It was such a weird feeling to know this guy, this stunning, sexy-as-hell and too-sweet-for-his-own-good guy, wanted her. And that she wanted him. Wanted to keep him. Right here, by her side, for as long as she could.
“Don’t think about where we might be in a month or two months or a year,” he said, his voice a low, lilting vibration against her temple. “Because right now, you’re the only person I want to be with. And I don’t expect that to change any time soon.”
They sat in silence for a few seconds. Then she whispered, “I think I’m falling for you.” I think I’ve already fallen for you.
He smoothed his thumb along her cheek. “Another thing we have in common then.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Will’s fingers trailed down her jaw, her neck, her collarbones. The warmth between them flared into a fire, sending sparks down her side and settling low in her stomach. She wanted to turn and climb onto the bench. To straddle him right there beneath the moonlight and the dim yellow glow of a nearby streetlamp.
Will grew tense beside her. “Finn and some of the guys are at a bar a couple streets down. Want to join them?”
I’d rather have you to myself, she thought, and then promptly wanted to punch herself in the crotch. This might all be new to her, but she wasn’t going to turn into a simpering pile of hormone-charged emotions.
As if he’d read her mind, he said, “I wouldn’t mind keeping it just the two of us, but it might be better to have more company. I could introduce you to my friends.”
They left the playground and walked the five minutes down the street to the bar while Will told her about Glasgow. She was content to listen to him speak. Hell, he could be reading the dictionary and she wouldn’t mind as long as he did it in that accent. But she liked the opportunity to learn more about where he came from.
Once they passed the second block, he pulled her up to a bar with the front door propped open. Inside, the smoky air stung her eyes, and the dim lighting didn’t help much either. She recognized Finn immediately with his dirty blond hair sticking up at all angles. He was an attractive guy. Downright hot, in fact. And he seemed decent, despite his questionable hijacking of Will’s email, so she couldn’t work out what Kat had against him, other than the fact he’d taken the lead role away from an actual drama student. Leah supposed that would piss her off too, but despite the supposed enmity, it had been immediately obvious to her that Kat was attracted to him. She’d been hiding it beneath hostility, but the girl had undoubtedly wanted to tear Finn’s clothes off (Finn probably mistook it for Kat wanting to tear his head off). Leah knew sexual attraction when she saw it.
Finn spotted them and lifted a hand to get Will’s attention. Then his eyes—and his smile—grew wide when he saw Leah.
“Did you two love birds kiss and make up?” he asked, throwing his arms around the both of them.
Will pushed him off and said, “I don’t kiss and tell.”
“Hey, Scotty, introduce us!” One of Will’s other friends shoved forward to thrust his hand out at Leah.
She gave his proffered hand and his liquor-tainted breath a flat look. Then, declining to touch him, she looked at Will and asked, “Scotty?”
“You know, because I’m Scottish. Sorry, forgive him. He’s an idiot. What was I thinking wanting you to meet my friends?” Will said, laughing.
“I’m Andy,” Will’s friend said, still smiling. His glazed look meant he was well on his way to getting drunk despite that it was a Monday night. He slapped a hand on Will’s shoulder. “We haven’t seen this guy in weeks, and now I know why. He’s been holding out on us.” A couple guys behind him shouted
something unintelligible that made Will laugh.
“Just so you know,” Finn said, “if you’ve got any questions about him, I’m your guy. Did you know he keeps the stuffed hippo he had as a kid in the back of his closet?”
While Andy and the other guys roared with laughter, Will gave a low chuckle and said, “How do you even know that?”
“I’m observant,” Finn said. “Plus, I was snooping.” He looked at Leah and added, “I don’t normally do that. He’s just special.”
Leah smiled. This whole ‘meeting his friends’ thing was kind of fun. She’d never cared to know much about the guys she slept with. In fact, the less she knew the better (except in the case of her burglar). Guys in her past had only mentioned introducing her to friends or family members a few times—those were usually the guys who didn’t realize they were having a one night stand and wanted to get her number in the morning. She always cleared things up for them pretty quickly.
But everything was different and new with Will, and she knew that, eventually, she would learn to stop being afraid of that.
And hey, she was actually in a bar, voluntarily socializing (sort of) with strangers for no other reason than to hang out. She couldn’t wait to tell Helena later. Helena would flip. Neither of them were big on barhopping. Helena had shared the party scene with Leah their freshman year. Unlike Leah, however, Helena had kept her priorities straight. Seeing how deep Leah was getting into the party lifestyle, she had taken Leah aside and slapped the sense back into her. Now, they preferred to have their alcohol while comfortably situated in their living room. Less mess and much more convenient for passing out.
“Come on,” Will said with a low laugh. “Let’s get out of here before Finn starts telling you what color my pants are.”
“They’re dark gray,” Finn said, and then snickered when Will shoved him.
Leah glanced down at his jeans. They were dark blue, not gray. She was missing something here.
“He means his underwear,” Andy said loudly. Some nearby college students looked over at them, expressions curious. One of them even scoped out the boys’ waists to look for peeking underwear. “Took me a while to figure that one out too.”
The corner of Leah’s mouth quirked into a crooked smile. Maybe she and Finn would have a talk one of these days.
“Is your underwear a common topic?” she asked Will. This didn’t bother her in the least.
“I wish it weren’t.”
“Where’d you two meet anyway?” Andy asked, leaning too close to Leah again and wavering unsteadily. Finn gave him a none-too-gentle shove. It didn’t seem to faze him. “You go to REU?”
“Save the questions for when you’re sober so I won’t have to tell you everything twice,” Will said with a small laugh. He nudged Andy toward their other friends. “Who’s DD? Make sure you get his keys from him.”
“You got it, Scotty,” one of them said before Andy muttered something about having to piss. They dragged him off toward the bathroom.
With a hand at Leah’s elbow and an apologetic look for his friends, Will guided her to an empty stool at the bar.
“They’re lucky Scotty was awesome,” she said. She shook her head when the bartender asked if she wanted anything. Will ordered soda, which hopefully meant he was no longer nervous.
“You’ve watched Star Trek?”
“Just the movies. I’m surprised you’ve watched Star Trek.”
“Finn is a fan.” Will gave a small shrug and then paused in such a way that Leah knew he was thinking about how to ask something. “When you left my apartment that night, you said you couldn’t believe you had put up with the therapy for me. But you’d been attending the meetings for a long while before I showed up.”
Leah grimaced. “My roommate made me promise to attend twenty sessions for getting us burglarized.”
“And that first time you kissed me, you told the counselor you’d been attending for twenty weeks.” A slow smirk twisted his mouth. “You didn’t have to keep coming back, but you did.”
“Don’t look so satisfied. You said you quit the project, but you kept coming back too.”
He gave a short laugh, and his smile turned sheepish. “That’s true. But you wouldn’t give me your name so I didn’t know how else to find you.”
There was a brief silence as both of them awkwardly acknowledged attending therapy and listening to the lurid tales of their fellow members for no other reason than to see each other. What would the counselor think of that?
Leah was admiring the way the smoky air added a dreamy quality to his blue eyes when a rough hand came down on her shoulder.
“Hey! Remember me?” a scruffy-looking guy with a goatee asked, leaning in much too close.
He was kind of cute. And vaguely familiar.
Shit. Dread spilled into her stomach.
She pushed his hand off her shoulder and fixed him with a look of cool distaste. She hoped it would make him leave. “Should I?”
The guy leered. “I could remind you,” he said, before dropping his eyes to her cleavage. Her face grew warm with anger and embarrassment.
She wasn’t ashamed of her past. She might have used sex as a substitute for a real relationship, but she wasn’t defined by who she slept with. And whatever Helena believed, it wasn’t an addiction. She had screwed up, and she had learned from it. She didn’t care what anyone thought of her anyway.
But she did care about what Will thought of her.
Will stood, a dark look tightening the lines of his face at the same time Goatee gave Leah a lewd smile and said, “I heard there’s a nympho on campus. Know who it might be?”
A hand gripped Goatee’s shoulder and pulled him back. Finn inserted himself neatly between Leah and Goatee, and released a dramatic sigh before she could even think of a response.
“You’re completely right,” he said, stepping into Goatee’s personal space. “It’s me. Want to join me in the men’s bathroom?”
Goatee gave Finn a disgusted look before stumbling off in confusion.
Once he was gone, Finn turned to face them with a triumphant grin. “I owed you one for being a dumbass at the theater.”
“Thanks,” she said and meant it.
Will laughed and brushed his fingers over her arm. Warmth tingled through her skin.
“So,” she said once Finn had wandered back to his corner of the bar, “where are you taking me for our second date?”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Two months later
Leah had given herself one rule in her relationship with Will. No sex for two months. She maintained she never had a full-blown addiction, and the fact she hadn’t had sex in over six months—not since the burglary—reassured her of this. Even Helena had begun to ask when she would put them both out of their misery and just sleep with him. But Leah wanted to be absolutely, one hundred percent certain that sex wouldn’t play a factor in how she felt for Will.
She hadn’t told him this, of course, but he seemed to understand because any time a kiss got too heavy and she pulled away, he responded only with a small smile and gentle fingers against her cheek. He’d been excruciatingly patient, taking only what she would give while still making her head spin and her heart pound.
Now, as they stumbled into his bedroom, she was more than ready to resume what she had stopped over two months ago.
Thirty minutes earlier, she and Will had been leaving the theater where they’d gone to see the final showing of Finn’s play. She had nudged Will’s jaw with her hand while lifting to her toes to whisper in his ear.
“You once promised to let me feel you inside me, pressing me into the bed.”
Will had gone perfectly still. And then he’d turned his head and caught her mouth in a kiss so hot that the sun might have burned with envy.
The drive from campus to his apartment had felt impossibly long, especially with him thwarting her attempts to undo his pants while he drove. Admittedly, that was probably smart of him.
The moment the apartment door shut behind them, she had wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. Limbs and mouths tangled, they had careened down the hallway into his bedroom and collapsed onto the bed without breaking the kiss.
She felt too hot in her own skin, as if a fire had been ignited inside her bones, burning everywhere he touched her. Heat crackled between them, making her arch her hips up into Will’s and moan at the sweet pressure.
He pulled her shirt off, eager hands making him clumsy, and he laughed when the shirt caught on her elbow. She freed herself before allowing a laugh to escape as well. They had been looking forward to this for so long that neither could believe it was finally happening.
He grasped her arm, gently turning it so he could place a light kiss on her elbow where her shirt had left a red imprint in her skin. Smiling, she dragged her fingers through his tousled hair.
Somewhere in the back of her mind remained the lingering fear that she would lose interest in him after this, but it was hard to imagine that happening.
With how much time she spent in his apartment, she practically lived here already. And Elijah was quite attached to him as well, which doubled the stakes.
That’s what Leah told herself anyway, as Will trailed a series of hot kisses down her chest to the edge of her lace bra.
It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that she was utterly, crushingly in love with him.
He unclasped her bra, this time with careful, deft fingers, and she shrugged it off, tossing it aside. With one hand at the small of her back, and the other tracing the bottom swell of her breast, he lowered his head and closed his mouth over her nipple. She gasped, his mouth chasing away her sanity as she fumbled to release the button of his jeans. He drew away, sliding off the mattress to finish undressing, and she shivered at the loss of his heat. Impatient and wanting, she quickly discarded the rest of her clothes as well, kicking off her panties in what was probably an incredibly unsexy move.
Heat Up the Fall: New Adult Boxed Set (6 Book Bundle) Page 38