Maggie’s clothes.
The ones that mattered. The imperative priority in the hierarchy of get-naked.
Her shirt was somewhere around the TV, her bra still secured but with the cups pushed low beneath her breasts so her tight perfect nipples rasped against his chest with their every movement.
They’d worked those slim-legged pants free and left them in a heap beside the door, where she stood in barely her underwear while he was nearly fully dressed. His fly open, the condom he’d pulled from his wallet palmed in one hand. Knicks shirt pushed up and boxer briefs down so his cock sprang free between them for the fraction of a second before he’d caught her legs and wrapped them around his waist.
And then he had her where he wanted her. Pinned against the door, their only barrier the damp of her silk panties.
Her knees tightened as she rode against his shaft, driving him insane.
Making him want into her wet heat more than he wanted his next breath. More than he wanted—
“Just this, Tyler. I know it can’t be more.” Up and down she moved, breathlessly promising, “I don’t need more.”
But she should have it. Only more was the one thing he couldn’t give, while this he could.
He ripped open the condom with his teeth and Maggie rolled it on him. Then, pulling her panties to one side, he lifted her so she was slick and wet and open above him.
Their eyes met.
She was waiting. Ready. And in that moment, his.
He brought her down hard over him, filling her in one thrust as she gasped his name, clenching tight around him.
Fucking heaven.
—
Tyler was full-length inside her, taking her so deep she felt the welcome nudge of him at her womb.
Yes, this was how she wanted him. What had kept her awake nights and distracted through the days. The need to feel him everywhere at once, between her legs, against her lips, within her arms, and teasing her breasts.
“Yes.” God, he was lifting and lowering her again, setting a rhythm that had her breath catching at each interval, her eyes glazed and her body spasming with every hard, penetrating thrust. So deep. So hard. He drove in and out, each kiss against her sex bringing her closer to that place she needed to go.
Pleasure spiraled throughout her center, coiling tighter and tighter. Making her ache, and need, and clamor toward that place only he could take her.
She cried out, but the sound was lost to Tyler’s kiss.
And then his arms were snaking around her, pulling her back from the door and carrying her to the couch. He laid her against the thick cushions, and catching one leg beneath her knee, widened her legs as he resumed his steady thrusts. Drawing back in deliberate measure, only to ease in inch after sensitive inch until he’d taken her as far as her body would allow. Then, reaching between their bodies, he set his thumb against her.
She was so close, nearly there. Her breath fragmenting with her thoughts as he rubbed her there, circling with firming strokes, until the air thinned and the room fell away and all the whys and why-nots for everything she wanted, but couldn’t have, ceased to exist.
There was just this. Now.
Her climax breaking over her like a crushing wave. Tyler taking her apart and bringing her back together. His hoarse groan at her ears as her pleasure screamed free against the hammering pulse of his neck.
When Maggie’s world returned, it was with the brush of Tyler’s fingers across her temple, trailing down her cheek to her lips. He was propped on one elbow, searching her eyes.
“Maggie, I don’t want to hurt you.”
She leaned up and kissed him. “You won’t. We both know what we’re doing. What this is and what it isn’t. I don’t want anything else.”
Some small part of her brain called out to her, warning that that was what she’d said about one night being enough. But then Tyler was kissing her again, his arms sliding around her and drawing her up against him as he carried her toward the bedroom.
Chapter Twenty-two
MARCH
It had been a busy morning at the gallery, followed by an early afternoon meeting with a local sculptor she’d been tipped off to. The meeting had been a score, and Maggie was putting the paperwork together when the front door opened and Ava hustled in.
Checking the clock and seeing it was only two, Maggie held up her hands. “What’s this? Late lunch or calling it an early night? Or do you have a client out here, ’cause I thought they kept you chained to your desk until all the happy-hour specials were through?”
Something was seriously up, because Ava was all but vibrating with her news.
“This is San Diego.” Stepping up to the front desk, she gripped the counter in front of her. “Bev Flizik was supposed to fly out and help with the initial setup. It’s a six-week thing and she was booked to leave today, but she slipped on some ice outside her apartment last night,” and now Ava was nodding like she couldn’t stop, leaning her diminutive form over the desk and her big brown eyes wide and bright, “and broke her leg in two places!”
And then she just snapped and everything ran together at once. “IfeelreallybadforheryouknowIdo—”
Maggie broke down laughing. “I get it. You feel bad, but—”
“But I’m going tonight! San Diego in March for six weeks!” she squealed, bouncing up and down as she clapped her hands, Ava’s excitement so contagious that Maggie was up and around her desk, jumping right along with her.
When they slumped back against the desk, Maggie eyed the frozen sludge lining the streets and the bleak gray sky beyond. Winter had started off slow, but once it got its teeth in, it wasn’t letting go. “Don’t suppose you’re stopping by to tell me you get to bring a friend. All expenses paid.”
Not that she’d be able to leave the gallery that long, even if it were the case.
“Not this trip, but I’ll suggest it next time.” Then, pushing back from the counter, Ava made a show of checking her watchless wrist and clucked her tongue. “They’ve got a car picking me up in a couple of hours to take me to the airport. So I gotta book it out of here. But I needed to stop by and get me some Maggie love before I go.”
Heart aching, she hugged her friend tight. “Six whole weeks?”
In all the years they’d been friends, they’d never gone that long without seeing each other. Heck, she couldn’t remember going six whole days.
Ava squeezed the air out of her lungs before letting go and giving her eyes a quick wipe as she stepped back. “I know. You’ll miss me. Desperately. And I’ll try to think of you once or twice between chowing on my fresh-caught fish tacos and reapplications of sunscreen.”
“Mean!” Maggie gasped, holding a hand over her heart as she laughed.
“Whatever. You’ll have Apartment Three to console you through the long nights.”
That she would. Or at least through a few hours of them, anyway.
Though they hadn’t put a label on it or discussed the lines and limits—like that Tyler never spent the night—in her mind, Maggie had been calling their arrangement a friendly affair. They were friends and they had sex.
Hot sex.
Creative sex.
Text-me-at-three-A.M.-even-though-I-have-to-get-up-at-six-because-I-know-it-will-be-worth-it sex.
And it was. Always. Enough so that on March second, she’d practically skipped over to Ava’s place with her announcement that the month had been checked off her list for the pact. She might not be planning a future with Tyler—which worked fine for her. But the guy had zero problems with the stake-upping required to make their dates count.
Which reminded her.
“What about the pact?” she asked, trying to curb her sudden rush of excitement. Best she knew, Ava hadn’t locked down the month yet, which meant for once, there was a chance—
“Banker Guy. He’s been riding the back burner with a bunch of Sam-style flirting. But I let him take me out for lunch today.” Hand on hip, Ava flashed a winning smile.
<
br /> One that any other day might have earned her a bite-it smile back. But today, her friend was leaving and Maggie wasn’t in the mood for taunts.
Ava’s phone rang and, after a glance at the screen, she grabbed Maggie for one last squeeze. “Gotta bolt. Miss you!”
Maggie waved and then slumped into her chair, all her energy seeming to have whooshed out the door with her exuberant friend.
It was only six weeks.
She was a big girl, with a full life that didn’t revolve completely around her very best friend.
Six weeks wasn’t so long.
Four hours later, she’d dragged herself up the walk to her door, her eyes lingering on the dark windows of Ava’s now empty apartment. She trudged up the stairs to her place, and rounding the rail stopped dead, completely unprepared for what she saw.
Tyler. Standing with his shoulder against the door frame, legs crossed, flour dusting his T-shirt and jeans, and a plate of what she’d bet Ava’s first-born were Toll House chocolate chip cookies in hand.
“Condolence cookies?” Maggie asked, looking from the plate back to Tyler’s smiling face, that perfect blend of tender amusement in his eyes—and something scary started happening to that hollow space inside her. The one she tried not to think about or look too closely at, hoping if she just left it alone it would never bother her again. But as Tyler offered her the biggest cookie, that space was filling fast, spilling over with too much emotion for her to contain.
Tyler shrugged, but she could see in his face that it was more than that. “Didn’t want you to have to make your own.”
Oh man. This was so bad.
—
This was bad.
Tyler stared at Maggie’s ceiling, watching the morning light creep steadily into her room. Their legs were in an intimate tangle beneath the sheets, her head resting in the notch of his shoulder and her hand curled atop his chest.
He’d been awake for an hour, telling himself he’d screwed up.
Thinking about the night before. About Maggie’s face when she’d seen him waiting for her. About the way something turned over in his chest at her smile and how he’d thought he could grow old earning smiles like that and never get tired of it. He’d known he was making a mistake, but still he’d followed her into her apartment and spent the evening seeing exactly how many of those heart-slamming smiles he could score. And when the night was through, instead of kissing her goodbye and going back to his own place the way he’d sworn he would, he kissed her good night. Pulled her into his arms and didn’t let go.
It was early. There was still time to minimize the damage. All he had to do was give up his hold on her. Take his arm from where he’d wrapped it around her back and hip, and just…let her go.
Only Maggie sleeping in his arms, tucked close against him so her soft breath feathered across his ribs, was too good. And the one more minute he’d been lying to himself about for the past sixty became yet one more.
He didn’t want to let her go.
The day before, he’d stood in his kitchen staring at the dregs of his single man’s breakfast. He’d rinsed the last floating Cheerios down the drain and washed his bowl by hand, leaving it to dry on the small rack next to the sink. He hadn’t used the dishwasher since he’d moved in. Living alone, it would start to stink of rancid food before he’d accumulated enough dirty dishes to fill it.
But just for kicks, he’d opened the thing and stared inside. Started counting slots and estimating how many cups he could fit. Thinking about a table cluttered with silverware, plates, and glasses.
And now, as he lay there with Maggie, waiting for the new day to begin, he thought about a space that was noisy instead of silent, with Maggie laughing in the kitchen as she taught someone small to make her favorite cookies.
The pain in his chest was so sharp, this time he couldn’t stay still. Easing out from beneath that sexy spill of blond hair and the sleepy woman it belonged to, he dropped a kiss at her temple and told her to go back to sleep.
Rubbing at the spot beneath his ribs that wouldn’t stop hurting, he put on his clothes and then headed for the door.
What the fuck happened to his life?
—
“Why are you whispering?” Ava asked, more intent on munching her bag of chips than she was on the video chat Maggie had waited as long as humanly possible—a full four hours—before making.
“Why are you eating Doritos for breakfast?” Maggie countered, then, looking around at the empty gallery, wondered, Yeah, why am I whispering? Honestly, she didn’t quite know, except that maybe some part of her was afraid if she said it too loud, she’d ruin it. Crazy, but right now everything felt crazy. Not that Ava seemed to notice.
“Early meeting and the muffin guy didn’t show. This was all there was in the kitchen and I had to fight damned dirty to get them. I think my boss has a broken toe, but I warned her being in her sixties wasn’t going to keep her from getting hurt—”
“We didn’t have sex,” Maggie cut in, her words coming in some kind of whisper-squeal that was generally more Ava’s style than her own, but who cared, because OMG, they hadn’t had sex!
Ava’s face screwed up and she tapped at her screen with a chipped fingernail. “Wait, what?”
But Maggie was already nodding, holding the phone so close she probably looked like one big, creepy mouth on Ava’s feed. “Okay, so you know he’s stayed over the last four nights. And Ava, I didn’t want to read anything into it, because we have a pretty clear understanding about where this isn’t going, and being able to trust each other on that is a big thing for us. But then last night, we cooked this nice dinner and—seriously, he’s even better in the kitchen than he is in bed, and by that I mean cooking versus sex whether it’s in the kitchen or not—but after we ate we cleaned up together, laughing, getting the dishes loaded, talking, and then we just vegged in front of a movie for a couple of hours and after,” Maggie sucked in a breath she sorely needed, “we went to sleep.”
Ava blinked at the phone like she was waiting for the rest, and when all she got was more of Maggie’s manic nodding, she let out a disgusted sigh.
“That’s the most boring story I’ve ever heard. You texted me five times for—” Suddenly she jolted upright, and then Maggie’s feed was all one big brown Ava eyeball. “Wait, wait! You mean you guys went to sleep without having sex? At all? Not even halfway through making dinner?”
Not even on the couch after that sexy Fiat commercial played.
“Not once.”
“So what do you think it means? Are you guys legit? Like with the picnics and hand holding and suddenly you’re sharing a Google calendar?”
Maggie shook her head, because the truth was she didn’t know. On the one hand, nothing had changed. Tyler was still waiting, hoping to get his son back. While on the other hand, nothing had changed. It had been two months since Tyler first told her about Charlie, and she knew he’d made his monthly calls, but he wasn’t any closer to Gina coming around than he’d been that first night.
And all that aside, despite her growing feelings for the man, Maggie was still more than a little apprehensive about pursuing the kind of official relationship that traditionally accompanied them. So she didn’t know…anything.
Anything, that was, except whatever was happening, it felt good.
—
Tyler rocked back on his heels, grinning out the window at the street below, while his baby brother, Mitch, twenty-six, at his ear, swore like a sailor through the line as Tyler talked him through the faucet repair in his old place. The apartment Mitch had been renting from him since Tyler moved with Gina and Charlie down to the South Loop.
It was good to catch up. Find out what he’d been doing since Christmas. Though he’d been surprised to hear the family hellion hadn’t been up to much beyond working long hours writing banking software and bitching about all the time-sucking meetings he kept getting roped into.
Two years ago, if he’d gotten his brother on th
e line all he would have heard was BS about Tyler selling his bike and whether or not he could get Mitch the number of a model they’d used for a shoot. The guy had grown up a lot since then, and Tyler had missed most of it.
“Hey-hey,” his brother laughed through the line as the tap sounded in the background going on and off. On and off. “Running water. Never thought I’d be so happy to see it. Thanks, man.”
“You bet.” He didn’t want to miss any more. Hell, he’d been feeling that way about a lot of things lately.
Another call was coming in.
“Hold on a sec.” Tyler pulled the phone from his ear to see who it was. Maggie was due back from work pretty soon, and they’d been talking about ordering in, so—
His heart stalled, the muscles up his back cranking tight. Not Maggie.
“Mitch, man, sorry, but I’ve got to take this.”
“No problem—later.”
Tyler connected the call. “Gina. Everything okay?”
—
A hearty stack of take-out menus in hand, Maggie jogged up to Tyler’s, giving a cursory knock before letting herself in.
“I’m leaning toward Thai,” she suggested, then, flipping through the next menus, added, “but I could definitely be swayed by Greek or Italian. What do you think?” She looked up to where Tyler stood staring at the dishwasher.
“What is it?” she asked, belly tense because the expression on his face was one she’d never seen before, couldn’t exactly read, but instinct warned she wouldn’t like.
“She called, Maggie,” he answered, meeting her eyes. “Gina called. She asked me to meet her tonight.”
At first she’d thought she heard wrong. That it was a mistake. But when her eyes dropped to his hand and the phone still white-knuckled within, she knew she hadn’t. It wasn’t. And God, she felt like the wind had been knocked out of her, complete with that horrific sense of powerlessness where she couldn’t do anything but wait for the air to eventually return. And when it did, she somehow managed to put it to use for the words she had to say and on some level—one where she cared more about Tyler getting what he’d been working toward for so long than her own heart—actually meant.
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