When The Stars Align

by Jeanette Grey

  Resolve and hope lit in her chest. She could keep both eyes open. She could curb his expectations. When their time was up, she’d let him down gently. And in the meantime, for just a little while, she could have this.

  Smiling, oblivious to her decision, he leaned in closer. He took her hand in his. “Long story short, we talked things out. We decided we were better off as friends. And as soon as I could, I caught a flight back here, so I could see you.” With that, he squeezed her palm. He nudged her nose with his own in a gesture that was far too sweet, then caught her lips in a kiss.

  It was almost as good as their first kiss—maybe better because she had some clue about what was going on between them now. She parted her mouth and let his tongue inside. Idle sparks of arousal darted from her breasts to between her legs, and if the drape of the sheet was anything to go by, she wasn’t the only one who was ready for another go.

  It would be so easy, too. If she just put her hand on his chest, or hell, right on his cock. Kissed him a little deeper or climbed up on his lap, they could be off and running for a second round in no time. After, they could end up the same way they had at the end of their first, holding each other through the afterglow.

  She could fall asleep, right here in his bed.

  Temptation clawed at her. She’d never really done that before, not on purpose, and he was so warm and held her so nicely.

  But they had to pace themselves. It was her job to keep this thing in check.

  Groaning out her reluctance, she tore herself away from him. “I should go.”

  “You should stay.” He pursued her as she tried to retreat, kissing her and pressing her into the headboard.

  “I should go,” she repeated. She shoved at his chest.

  He heard her this time. The disappointment on his face killed her, but as he retreated, giving her room to breathe, she took it.

  And then fucked everything up, leaning back in to kiss him.

  No. No, no, no, no, no. Releasing another noise of frustration, she put a finger over his lips and pushed him away with it. “Okay. Just so we’re clear, I want nothing more than to have you fuck me into this mattress right now.”

  She preferred being on top, having control. But seriously, at some point, that was happening.

  He visibly twitched beneath the cover of the sheet. Against her finger he got out, “Then why—”

  “But it’s getting late. And I really shouldn’t stay here.”

  His forehead crinkled. “Why not?”

  She scrambled, trying to think of something. Sadly, all she was left with was the truth. Well, a version of it. She dropped her hand from his mouth and slipped past him to start gathering her clothes. “Listen, I know we jumped into bed together pretty fast.” She stopped him before he could question that. “And it was awesome. No regrets. But”—she drew in a deep breath—“I don’t want to rush things.”

  I don’t want you to do anything you might regret.

  And besides… “I know we’re not going to keep this a secret or anything.” Apparently, everyone knew, just from their flirting. “But Carol will know if I stay out all night, and I don’t want to deal with Jared making comments in the morning. I don’t want to be…” It was part of why she’d always selected her conquests from anonymous clubs. “I don’t want to be the girl who sleeps with the guy.” She wasn’t saying this right. “I need people to respect me.”

  His eyes were sad, but he didn’t put up any further protest. Except… “Are you saying you’ll never want to sleep over here?”

  Shit. That sounded terrible.

  But when he brought up the other aspect of staying the night—the part about how she would be sleeping with him, it made a vulnerable little piece inside of her tremor. It made another piece of her glow.

  Fighting both reactions, she took a deep breath. She found her underwear and shorts and drew them on before climbing onto the bed to press an insistent kiss against his lips. “Not never. Just not all the time. And not tonight.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t sound entirely happy about it, but he didn’t sound like he wanted to argue anymore, either. He let her go, and she slipped away to claim her bra from the floor.

  She was pulling her shirt over her head when he piped up. “I never did get a chance to really look at your tattoo.”

  He hadn’t been lying about really, really liking her piercings and ink, huh? “Maybe next time.”

  Then he was rising off the bed in all his naked glory, stalking over to her.

  “What—” she started.

  “Definitely next time.” With that, he grasped her face between his hands and hauled her into a kiss so deep and dirty it stole her breath.

  When he let her go, she felt a little dazed. But he didn’t press. He went to his dresser and pulled a fresh pair of underwear from a drawer and stepped into them. For a second, all she could do was stare.

  “Next time,” she agreed faintly.

  “Okay, then.” When she stood there, staring at him dumbly, he rolled his eyes. “I’m using willpower here to not act like a caveman and drag you back to bed. But if you’re going to go, you should probably do it now.”

  Right. She got her socks and boots on and found her binder under his shirt. More or less put together again, she straightened up and cast one last glance at him. Gorgeous, barefoot, shirtless him.

  He wasn’t the only one using a hell of a lot of willpower now.

  Without another word, she turned to the door. In a few quick strides, she was through it and down the hall and spilling out into the warm night air. She pressed her spine to the door as she pulled it closed behind her.

  This was the right decision. No matter how much it felt wrong.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You kids got everything you need?” Lisa stretched her arms up overhead, pushing back from the bank of monitors.

  Adam cast a quick glance at Jo for confirmation, then smiled and nodded at Lisa as she stood. “Pretty sure we’re good.”

  More than good. Great. Once his advisor headed home, it’d be just him and Jo here, manning a bazillion-dollar telescope until three in the morning. Sure, there’d be a tech in the other room, but they’d be more or less alone.

  A night with nothing to occupy him except science and a beautiful girl. His girl. He wasn’t sure he could ask for anything more.

  Gathering her papers, Lisa ran through his plan for the rest of the night’s data gathering with him, and Adam gave her as much of his attention as he could. Finally, she slung her bag over her shoulder, said her goodbyes, and headed for the exit. Adam watched her as she went, until finally she turned the corner and he heaved a sigh of relief.

  “I thought she’d never leave,” he groaned.

  Closing the gap he’d been so careful to maintain these past few hours—these past few days, except in the privacy of his room—he hooked an ankle under one of the legs of Jo’s chair and yanked her toward him.

  “What the—” she started, but then she was right there, warm and tucked up against him, the seats of their chairs jammed together.

  God, he’d been waiting so long to touch.

  In the weeks before they’d gotten together, he’d built up the idea of being with her so much; deep down, he’d half worried that finally sleeping with her would take the sheen off, but it had done precisely the opposite. They’d met up twice more in the handful of days since he’d returned from his conference, and each time only made him hungrier. Right now, he was starving.

  He leaned in to nose behind her ear, and she gave a little shiver, tipping her neck to the side to give him access, even as she pushed him away.

  “Not here,” she insisted.

  “But we’re all alone.”

  “Miguel’s up in the booth.”

  “Half asleep and watching telenovelas on the TV in there. You know he never bothers us after midnight.”

  “B-but—” she stuttered as he brushed his lips over her pulse. “Your experiment.” She reached past him
toward the data scrolling in.

  “The cluster we’re looking at doesn’t set for an hour.”

  “But don’t you want to see what you’re collecting?”

  “I’d rather see you.” Naked. Three times now they’d taken some or all of their clothes off, and he still hadn’t managed to get a really good look at her back. The tattoo was of an animal, he was pretty sure, and it spanned the length of her spine, rippling waves of black ink curling out across her ribs. A tail or a tip of a wing climbing up onto her neck.

  He wanted to lick it.

  “You can see me anytime,” she argued.

  He wished that were true.

  He wanted to press, wanted to talk her into going out on the deck with him, or off to one of the restroom stalls. But she was squirming for real now, the playfulness giving way to actual annoyance.

  He sighed. “Fine, if you really insist on me doing my job—”

  “I do.”

  “Instead of taking you apart with my tongue.” He drew back and raised his brow. It was another thing he hadn’t gotten a chance to do that he was dying to.

  For a second her resolve faltered, her gaze flickering to his mouth. But then she took a deep breath and gave him a look that could peel paint off a wall. “Adam.”

  The curl of disappointment was only a little one. He’d known who he was getting into bed with when they’d started this.

  “Fine, fine.” He could admit when he was beaten. Mostly. He dropped his hand from her waist, but when she made to roll to her side of the desk, he locked his ankle behind the wheel of her chair, holding her there.

  “What—”

  “One kiss.” He held up his hands and showed her his cheek.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” But she didn’t grumble too much before leaning in.

  At the last second, he turned his head, darting in to cup her jaw and hold her there as he pressed his lips to hers. He swept his tongue over the loop of metal and then past it and into her mouth.

  And it was the last thing he’d been expecting, but she opened to his kiss. Let him deepen it and keep her close. Her fingers dug into his arm, her teeth scraping just right against his tongue, and for a minute, he could honestly believe she wanted this as much as he did.

  But he wasn’t going to push.

  With more than a little reluctance, he pulled away, pressing one last kiss to her lips before releasing his foot. She stayed there, gazing at him with bitten lips and dark eyes for the span of a breath. Then she seemed to remember herself. Easing off slowly, she steered her chair to where it belonged. She picked up her pencil and turned the page of her notebook, and just like that, she was back to work.

  Which was probably what he should be doing, too.

  Returning to the monitor in front of him, he clicked over to the graph the computer was building from the readings streaming in. He bounced his knee up and down, fighting to stay focused as he reviewed the numbers. But it was a losing battle.

  The thing was, the actual work of an astronomer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was waiting for objects in the sky to rise and set, and analyzing data, and sitting around for hours on end. More often than not, it was about plodding and patience. Nights like this, it was just plain boring. While the woman beside him was anything but.

  She was a puzzle and a mystery and just about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Already, just looking at her or thinking about her had his chest pounding too hard. He wanted to figure her out, to literally and figuratively strip her bare.

  He wanted to know her. And if she wasn’t going to sleep with him during his shift, the least she could do was talk to him.

  Giving up, he let his gaze drift to the side. Jo was bent to her notes, the metallic glint of her lip ring sharp against her teeth, the long, pale column of her neck exposed. The skin looked beautiful and naked where it disappeared beneath her shirt, the side she’d turned to him devoid of ink or ornamentation.

  He paused. That first time she’d tried to kiss him, the night before he’d left to finish things with Shannon, Jo had been wearing a necklace. Before she’d made her move, he’d fixated on that bit of delicateness draped across her collarbone. He’d lifted his hand to touch it, had traced the silver chain to just beneath the hollow of her throat, and she’d told him…

  “What?”

  Adam blinked, and he was back in the present, in the observatory in the middle of the night, miles of inches between his body and hers. She was looking at him, one eyebrow cocked, a half-grin stealing across her face like she’d caught him doing something particularly lecherous, and like she didn’t mind.

  His gaze dropped instinctively to her breasts, but only for a moment. Because he’d said these words before. “You don’t usually wear jewelry.”

  “Excuse you?” She touched the studs in her ear and the hoop through her lip. “These aren’t enough for you?” She glanced around before lowering her hand to graze her nipple. “This isn’t enough?”

  Heat flooded him. “Believe me. They’re more than enough. It’s just…” Rolling his chair closer, he circled her wrist and moved her arm to the side. He settled his fingertips at the dip where her shoulder met her neck, trailing them down to where the pendant would have hung. “The other night. You wore a necklace. I haven’t seen you wear it since.”

  Her smile bled from her lips, and shutters seemed to fall, one by one, across her eyes. She pushed his hand away. “No. I haven’t.” She said it like a challenge, only he didn’t know to what.

  “Why? It was…” He trailed off before settling on, “Pretty.”

  She flinched. “Guess I just don’t feel like looking pretty very often.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Then what did you?”

  And that was the question, wasn’t it? He tried to put it into words, licking his lips and closing his hand around nothing. The little bit of decoration had been striking, for sure, a contrast to the utility of how she usually dressed. It had drawn his attention to the fragile parts of herself she rarely showed.

  The ones she never spoke about. Except that once.

  Swallowing, he lifted his gaze to meet hers. “You told me it was your mom’s.”

  And he watched all the color drain from her face.

  Shit. Jo really had said that, hadn’t she? Adam had looked at her that way he tended to, with that weird mix of reverence and lust, and he’d asked her about the necklace, and she’d just given it up.

  Inside her chest, her heart started racing, adrenaline flooding her veins. And she knew that fight or flight was a reflex, was a choice people made based on instinct, but it had never struck her as much of a choice at all.

  She fought. And if you fought hard enough, if you fought people before they even imagined they should make the first strike, they tended to run. It saved you the effort of having to fly yourself. It saved you ever having to fight or fly from them again, because they knew. They understood what they were dealing with.

  But Adam was sitting there, his knees almost touching hers, his gaze expectant. The skin of her throat burned from his touch, and her lips were kiss-bitten and damp.

  The very first thing she’d ever done was attack him. And yet here he still was, pushing her. He hadn’t run.

  And for the first time in her life, she didn’t want to fight him off.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep, shuddering breath. Setting her pencil down, she braced her elbows on the desk and dropped her head into her hands. “Yeah. It was.”

  A tentative hand settled on her shoulder. She stiffened beneath the weight but didn’t shake him off. “Are you okay?”

  Was she ever okay? “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t seem fine.”

  He was the one who’d had to go and ask her revealing questions. Then he wanted to give her a hard time when she reacted badly? Bullshit. “What do you want to know?”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She lifted her head to gl
ance at him through narrowed eyes. “You asked me about my mother for a reason.”

  “I asked you about your necklace.”

  Right. “As a way of asking me about my mom.”

  Something complicated happened in the vicinity of his mouth, not quite a frown and not exactly a smile. It was too open, too revealing. Too kind. “Actually, I was just trying to make conversation. And looking at your neck. Because it’s sexy as hell.” One corner of his lips crept up. “But if you want to tell me about your mother… I’d like to listen.”

  Oh, hell. He was trying to get to know her, wasn’t he? She stifled an ugly laugh by covering her face again with her hands. That shit was for couples—real couples, ones who didn’t have five-week expiration dates. Ones who had time to hug and kiss and cluck at each other over the slow revelation of their pasts and then move on from them.

  They didn’t have that kind of time. And deep down, she was pretty sure he didn’t really want to know.

  She sighed, concocting in her head how best to deflect and change the subject, when the pressure of his hand on her shoulder lightened, easing to a gentle stroking of his thumb.

  “Only if you want to,” he said, quieter now.

  She paused, the patience in his voice halting her. The air itself seemed to shiver as he slid his palm down her arm, letting her go. Letting it go, without pressing or asking too much of her.

  And it was like a puzzle piece suddenly turning in her mind, a link that hadn’t been there just a second before clicking jarringly, unexpectedly into place.

  Maybe their expiration date didn’t have to be a constraint. Maybe it was a kind of freedom unto itself.

  She didn’t have to tell him everything—no way in hell she ever would. But there were pieces she could let him know, parts of herself she could give away without toppling the careful, precarious tower she’d built. Because when this was over, when they left this island, he could take those pieces with him. She wouldn’t have to live with the version of herself he ended up with. It could be just for now.