With those in hand, he rerouted them to the couch, turned around, and sat on it, putting them in exactly the same position they’d been in before, except inside the warmth of the cottage.
But no sooner were they settled than she hopped off his lap. He was about to lodge a protest when he realized she was undoing her jeans.
He’d built a fire in the fireplace before she arrived, and it had burned down mostly to embers, but it was enough to see by. And she was something to see as she kicked off her jeans haphazardly.
“I’m coming right back there.” Her voice was husky as she nodded at his lap. “So unless you want me to hump you over your clothes, I suggest you take your pants off, too.”
Oh, crap. He pressed down on his dick for a second to get it to calm down before he did what she told him—but not before contemplating the strangely hot image of a naked Nora “humping him” while he was fully clothed. Something to remember for later, maybe.
The minute he sat back down, relieved of his pants, she climbed on top of him and immediately started on the buttons of her blouse. Following her lead, he pulled his shirt off. She slid closer on his lap until they were back where they’d been outside—minus the clothes. Which meant her nipples scraped against his chest, and she ground against his cock. She was wet already. So wet.
He hissed. He wanted to devour her. But he forced himself to be still, like she was. Closed his eyes and resisted bucking his hips up in time to the pulsing in his dick.
It was funny. This was exactly the same position they’d been in last night, in her room—her straddling his lap. But despite the mechanical similarities, everything was different. Before, they’d been teasing each other, alternately laughing and rocking against each other.
This was…heavy. Not in a bad way. But he had always thought of desire as something that escalated, ratcheting up and up and up until it exploded. This was the reverse. Like a coil spinning slowly inward, twisting inexorably tighter, like it was going to keep collapsing in on itself in a kind of slow-motion implosion.
“Jake.” She invoked his name on a long, slow exhalation as she started moving her torso from side to side against his. He remembered how much she’d seemed to like having her breasts played with last night, so he slid his hands down to cup them from the sides, aiming to add to the sensation as she rubbed herself against his chest. Her nipples were sharp little nubs. It felt like someone was drawing on him. “Oh my God, Jake.”
She pulled back with her torso, and he let his hands slide around to cup her breasts from the front. She hissed as she listed sideways. She was aiming for the box of condoms on the couch next to him.
The woman was good with her hands. In a matter of seconds, she had the box opened and a condom unwrapped. It was his turn to hiss as she unrolled it over him. She hadn’t actually touched his dick with her hands last night. He’d come too soon, rutting against her like a teenager. And even though this touch—the condom-unrolling touch—was all business, it felt so good. The pixie hands looked so good, one of them steadying him as the other sheathed him.
She kneeled up on the sofa and placed her hands on his shoulders as she hovered over his length. “Okay?”
A noise came out of him he didn’t recognize. It felt like a laugh—a laugh of incredulity because of course, yes, this was okay—but simultaneously like a groan of agreement. “Yeah,” he bit out. “You?”
Her answer was a wicked smile—and a slow, tight slide down his dick.
He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. “Fuuuuck.”
He had forgotten what this was like. Or maybe he’d never known what this was like. What she was like. She was tight and hot—and she was going to be his undoing.
She paused about halfway down and inhaled. He opened his eyes, righted his head, and examined her face. Her eyes were closed, and her face was screwed up in what he hoped was pleasure and not pain.
He let his hands settle lightly on her hips. Not to exhort her, but to remind her that he was with her. To facilitate their disentanglement if that was what had to happen. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She smiled but kept her eyes closed, like she was concentrating on something in her mind’s eye. “I just need a sec.”
He took the opportunity to examine her face. He’d thought of her as being tinged with the supernatural the first time he’d seen her. The pixie with the almost-white hair and the blue-gray eyes, she’d seemed cool, gilded with ice almost. But now, on his lap, in his cottage, painted with warm, orange light from the dying fire, she was positively radiating heat. It wasn’t just the wet warmth that encircled his cock, a velvet vise—though it was that—it was Nora. She was warm. She was warming him, somehow, when nobody else had been able to for so long.
She opened her eyes wide, said, “Wow,” and sank down most of the rest of the way.
All he was doing, on the surface of things, was sitting on his ass on the couch. He was no longer carrying her. He wasn’t lifting anything or holding anything up. But sweat poured from his skin all the same. Had he just thought she made him warm? No, that wasn’t the right word. He was on fire. The effort required to just sit there, while she impaled herself on him, looking at him the whole while with astonishment, like he’d invented sex or something, was almost unendurable.
“There,” she breathed as she sank the last few millimeters.
Her eyes were warm, too, as they bored into his. Cool gray-blue but also warm, which should have been impossible.
There was so much pressure gathered at the base of his spine, in his balls, that all he could do was let loose a low groan. He fought to keep his eyes open through it. He didn’t want to be the one to break the eye contact between them, which, oddly, felt like it was connecting them as much as their bodies were. He thought at first that they were going to take another pause, because she didn’t move initially. Then he thought they were going to resume the same slow, languid, heavy rhythm from before, because she tilted her hips slowly forward, an inch or so maybe, like she was trying to work herself even deeper onto him.
“Yes,” he exhorted, because that was a plan that suited him just fine.
But then she shocked him by running her hands, which had remained resting on the tops of his shoulders during her long, slow, exquisitely torturous descent, up the sides of his neck. His pulse thundered under her touch, but the pixie hands didn’t stop there. They slid up over his jaw. Over his ears, squishing his earlobes as they dragged their way upward. Finally her hands were buried in his hair.
She made fists, tangling her fingers in his hair as she lifted herself a few inches off him.
Don’t go. His hands instinctively tightened their hold on her hips. But he forced himself to let go, because of course he couldn’t keep her there if she didn’t want to be there.
But she wasn’t going, not for good anyway. She slid back down and moaned. It felt like a reprieve, and it sent a bolt of lust spiking up through his chest.
And back up she went, tightening her grip, using his hair for leverage to help her thrust against him. She was establishing a rhythm, and once he got the hang of it, he put his hands back on her hips, letting them splay over her ass cheeks and help lift her up and encourage her down.
It was a rhythm that was going to kill him, though. Just end him right here and now. It was slow. So torturously, deliciously slow. He started lifting his hips up to meet her measured downstrokes. He couldn’t help it, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just opened her eyes wider and laughed. A single, disbelieving “Ha!” escaped her lips, but it morphed into a moan.
Suddenly she jerked and tilted her hips forward. Spread her legs wider as her expression turned frustrated. He was pretty sure she was trying to rub her clit on him even as she kept bouncing up and down on his dick. Experimentally he let go of her ass with one hand and sought out the nub with his fingers.
She moaned again and bucked toward him. He watched her closely as his fingers slid through her wetness. “Yes?” he whispered.
&nbs
p; She nodded rapidly and lost her rhythm, her hips stuttering up and down and forward and back, but with no predictability. He rutted shamelessly upward, making the shallow, punishing strokes that he needed.
“Oh! Oh!” She went still for a moment, every part of her small body tensing in his arms. With one final “Oh!” she shattered. Her inner muscles spasmed around him, and her hands twisted in his hair, the sharp pull on his scalp shoving him over the edge of his own release. He swallowed a shout and thrust up so hard he feared momentarily that he was going to buck her off him, but he steadied them.
Remarkably, they’d kept staring at each other the whole time—and they still were.
He didn’t know what to say. So he just kept staring at her, panting.
Until the phone rang.
“You have a landline!” she exclaimed. She started to climb off him, but he banded his arms around her. He didn’t want her to go yet.
“I do, but I ignore it most of the time.” He was surprised his voice still worked. Surprised it hadn’t been scorched into oblivion.
She shot him a bemused look as the ancient answering machine lurched to life. The beep was really long, because there were God knew how many messages on that tape. Anyone who truly needed to find him knew how to do it, so he wasn’t overly worried about it.
“Jake. It’s Dennis Bates. Any chance you can fill in for me on the bridge for about an hour tomorrow evening? I have…something I have to do. Around six. Let me know.”
Dennis, damn him, had ruined the moment. Nora was shifting on his lap, and he could hardly insist she stay there. He reached down to hold on to the condom as she slid off.
“Oh, crap. I didn’t realize I was pulling your hair,” she said as she disentangled her hands from said hair. “Sorry.”
He winked at her as he tied off the condom. “You can pull my hair anytime you like, Doc.”
She rolled her eyes as she grabbed another of his mom’s quilts, one he had draped over the back of the sofa, and wrapped it around herself. He wanted to tell her not to do that, but that was not the kind of thing a person said in this sort of situation.
He watched her retrieve her clothes, and she hitched her head toward the small hallway that led away from the main room. “Bathroom?”
“First door on the left.”
When she emerged a few minutes later, she said, “What happened to Mick? Oh my God, did we leave Mick outside?”
It took a considerable amount of effort to hoist himself off the couch. He was pretty sure his body was in shock. Going from four years of being on ice to that? It was a miracle she hadn’t killed him. “No, he went in with me when I got the quilt and didn’t come back outside.” He pulled on his jeans, slipped past her, and flipped the light on in one of the two small bedrooms at the end of the hall. “I bet he’s in here.”
She followed him in. “Whoa.”
“My mom used this as a studio. Well, mostly she painted outside, but she kept all her stuff in here.” He pointed to a pile of old towels folded into a stack on the floor. Mick was curled up on top of them, snoring happily away. “She kept those towels there for quick cleanups. I’ve been noticing that Mick likes that spot.”
“Wow. It looks like your mother was just here.”
“Yeah, I haven’t touched it.” He moved past her. “Check this out.” He pointed to a tiny unused easel on the floor next to her main one. “She got this for Jude.”
“Oh,” she breathed. He felt her looking at him. She was checking to see if he was okay, facing this memory of his dead mother and his dead son.
Oddly, he was okay. “He was too young to use it, obviously, but she had this whole plan to convert him. She always said my brother and I took after our dad too much to be any good at art, and I think she was right.”
“Well, I don’t know. All that carpentry. All those paint jobs. You have an eye for beauty.”
Maybe so. Because Nora, her face flushed and her hair messed up, was surely a sight to appreciate.
“I mean, this place, too. The lake. You definitely have an eye, even if you’re not an artist per se.” She shook her head as if rousing herself. “I should go.” She shot him an almost shy smile. “I should get out of your hair.”
He wanted to tell her that she wasn’t in his hair. Or that if she was, he was happy to have her there. He wanted to grab her hand and literally tangle it in his hair again.
But that was just his body overreacting to the end of the long dry spell.
He held her coat for her and went hunting for his shirt. “Hang on. I’ll walk you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Nice try.”
“Should we wake Mick and have him come with us so he can get some exercise?”
“Nah. He ran around all day.”
“Jake Ramsey.” She put her hands on her hips and adopted a mock scolding face. “You are going to spoil my dog. What’s he going to do when I find a place to live and he has to go back to spending days by himself inside? What’s he going to do when I move back to Toronto?”
“He’ll be fine,” Jake said firmly. He wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to himself.
As they set out across the beach, he was hit again with the strong desire to take her hand. Unlike on the way in, he even had an excuse. It was a moonless night, so it was pitch-dark and she didn’t know this beach like he did. But they’d said no romance, so he needed to be disciplined here.
“So, uh, I have something to tell you.”
The way she said it, all trepidatious, gave him pause. “Okay.”
“I mean, I should have just said something earlier. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
Oh, crap. Something was wrong.
“I’m, uh, actually on the pill.”
“Okay?” He was trying to figure out where she was going with this.
“Rufus was super worried about pregnancy. Like, super, irrationally worried. Which was annoying in a way because it wasn’t like it was his career that would have been threatened by an unplanned pregnancy. So I was on the pill and we used condoms.”
“Okay.”
“Which means I was always having safe sex, even though I was apparently sleeping with a lying philanderer for at least part of the time. And just to be sure, I had STI testing done and it all came back fine.”
Oh. Holy shit. Was she saying what he thought she was saying?
“Have you had STI testing since Kerrie?”
“I have.” He was glad it was dark. She couldn’t see his face flush with pleasure. “So what are you saying, Doc?”
“Oh, crap, I forgot the boots.”
They had reached the end of the beach, the spot at which they needed to wade out to get around the outcropping.
He’d forgotten his boots, too. She made him forget stuff. But no matter. He kicked off the flip-flops he was wearing and swung her into his arms. This was better than holding hands anyway.
She shrieked and laughed and said, “Don’t do that! It’s freezing!” But then she settled, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“So what are you saying, Doc?” he asked again, his pulse thrumming.
“I’m saying maybe third base is sex without a condom. Though I’m pretty sure that home base is, like, ‘full sex,’ as the kids would say. But anyway. My point is just that maybe we don’t need condoms.” She paused and laughed nervously. “If you want to do this again. And, you know, if that’s okay with you. Because no pressure at all. I mean, we each just bought a box of condoms, so—”
“Nora?”
“Yeah?”
“Hush.”
“Okay.”
“Anytime you want to have sex, with or without condoms, you just let me know, okay?”
“So, just like splash my way into the cove and break down your door demanding sex?” She laughed.
“Works for me. Or call me.”
“Are you going to give me your phone number?” she teased.
“I am. I might even start checking
my messages.”
Chapter Thirteen
Nora spent Thanksgiving with Eve, Sawyer, and Clara, and Jake, Art, and Jamila.
It was a little bit awkward.
Apparently Sawyer and Clara, who had been on their zown since Sawyer was a teenager and Clara was little, often spent holidays with the Ramsey family. And Eve had been folded into the flock once she and Sawyer got together.
Now they were folding Nora in, too. Because she was new in town and had no plans and they were nice people. Not because she was together with anyone.
Or at least not in the way they imagined.
She shot a glance at Jake. She had been trying not to do that.
He didn’t notice. They were all clustered around the kitchen island at Art and Jamila’s house, munching on appetizers while Jamila fluttered around, refusing any help to get dinner ready. Jake was staring at the counter and nursing a beer.
She didn’t know if he was always like this—if this was part of the gruff, silent persona other people always remarked on—or if her presence was making things weird. She’d tried to refuse the invitation, but Eve and Sawyer wouldn’t let her.
He wasn’t just nursing the beer, he was sliding a thumbnail under the edge of the label and working it back and forth.
Oh God.
She had discovered this thing in recent days. Or Jake had discovered it. Anyway, it had been discovered. It involved her clit, which he paid a lot of attention to generally, but once, by accident, he’d sort of scratched it. She must have responded in such a way as to inspire him to do it again. And now there was a move, for lack of a better word. He would get her all worked up and then back off and play hard to get. After enough whining on her part, which he seemed to enjoy more than he really had a right to given that he was basically torturing her, he would gently scrape his nail—that very thumbnail he was now dragging back and forth over that beer label—over her clit. And she would blow. She would detonate. And he would smirk.
She hated it.
Aw, who was she kidding? She loved it. Just thinking about it made her squirmy.
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