Finding Mr. Right Next Door

by Sarah Ballance

  Blindly, he fumbled in his pocket, knowing he had to have a condom in there somewhere. He found it, and it was all he could do to stop twisting his tongue against the sharp bud of her breast to shove enough of his clothing down and out of the way to get the damned thing on.

  Her heat assaulted him from somewhere in his abdominal region, where he had her pinned against the wall. She wore a skirt—the one and only reason he’d ever be glad she went out with that loser—and while it offered precious little protection for his own sanity, it made sinking headfirst into a bad decision a hell of a lot easier than it ever should have been.

  He barely had to touch her to find she was ready, and if he spent a single solitary second ruminating on exactly how ready she was, he’d be done. He ignored it, pushing the thought away, yanking on her underwear until it had enough give for him to work around.

  She met his moment of hesitation with a phantom thrust, so hot and needy and leaving what felt like gouges with her fingernails across his back that he would have gone blind with lust if he hadn’t been so determined to see her. In that moment he existed in the stunning clarity of her eyes and the way her lips were swollen and pink and trailing his name in a whisper that distracted him from the sting of her nails at his nape.

  His last chance to walk away. To have a prayer of undoing this.

  Fuck that.

  He entered her in a single thrust that sent two more picture frames to the hardwood floor in a hail of shattering glass. He ignored them. The whole world could crash and burn and he wouldn’t have noticed. Not in that moment, when he was buried in this woman who already trembled around him. He ached, his legs shaking with the need to drive into her, but she was so close, her body so tight he couldn’t do anything but oblige. He was already deep, afraid he’d hurt her, but the moans she breathed when he ground against her didn’t originate from pain.

  It was her body taking some unholy revenge, squeezing and milking him until he couldn’t take it anymore. He gave in and withdrew, slamming back into her liked he’d been starved and had just found salvation.

  She gasped, her nails digging deeper. It was all he could do to breathe, to find the blue of her eyes. That was the contact he craved the most, he realized. The rest thrummed in a disbelieving haze, but they grounded him in a way that let him know this was real.

  Oh, my God, she whispered. Profanity followed. Then his name. Harder.

  He obliged, drowning in it. What the actual fuck, Lexi.

  Her orgasm ripped through him like it was his own. Instantly, he went over the edge, rocking his hips, pulsing and rolling deep inside her, capturing her moans with a hungry kiss that started off frantic and turned sweet, deep, and lazy, shuddering around them.

  And then reality came crashing in.

  Nothing. Nothing had ever been that damned good. And there was no way he hadn’t just lost her. She wanted forever, and that wasn’t something he’d ever been tempted to give anyone. Maybe one day he’d have tried, maybe he would have failed, but he couldn’t live with himself if he ever failed Lexi, and he didn’t know how to promise her that he wouldn’t.

  “Oh my God,” she murmured. And she sounded more stunned than elated.

  Well, that was his cue to exit. Fighting for balance against hot battering waves of dizziness, he started to set her down, but then he realized she wore only one shoe. The other was across the entry, a shard of glass sitting daintily atop it. Dazed, still holding her, still inside her, he stumbled, carrying her to the sofa several feet away. That had avoided the fallout zone, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t.

  He eased her to the cushions, and in the most awkward post-sex moment of his life, withdrew from her while his legs shook, a tidbit that the porch light seemed to spotlight through the glass. That picture window was getting an eyeful now, for sure. And so was Lexi. Her gaze stayed pegged on him until he cleared his throat. She turned a delectable shade of pink and averted her eyes.

  Good luck finding that from an app, he wanted to say, but he was shaken to the core. That wasn’t some random hookup.

  That was trouble.

  Remembering her earlier question, if that was all he had, he asked, “Better?”

  It didn’t sound like the joke he’d intended. In his head, it sounded like he wanted her to tell him it was the best sex she’d ever had in her life. That maybe they should get a snack and attempt it a second time, but in the horizontal position. That if something that good could happen against the wall, that they’d never have to get out of bed again.

  He wanted her to tell him she wanted him.

  Instead, he got a shaky grin he didn’t want to trust. And for good reason, because she nearly tore him in two when she sat up, adjusted her skirt, and hit him with, “That was a respectable attempt.”

  He managed to keep his jaw screwed shut. She was teasing him—she had to be—but he’d been kidding himself if he thought this could have ended any other way. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know what she really thought.

  That was his cue to throw back a joke, to keep things light, to make sure there was still air left in the room to breathe. Unfortunately, all he could think about was where they’d go from here—or, rather, the impossibility of them going anywhere.

  And then she was standing, her face a mask of uncertainty and something he prayed wasn’t regret. He wanted to say he didn’t regret it, that if that was all he ever had of her, he already had more than any one man deserved.

  Once again, the words wouldn’t come, and finally she just left.

  He couldn’t watch her go. He had no clue what would happen if he followed, so he stayed behind, cleaning up the literal glass and the figurative pieces, wondering what the hell had just happened. Knowing that whatever it was, things were forever changed between them.

  One way or another, what they’d had was gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lexi woke the next morning in the middle of a luxurious stretch, her body lusciously sore and—

  Oh, no.

  She bolted upright.

  It wasn’t a dream. She’d totally had hot, amazing sex with Matt. So much hotter and more amazing than she could have ever, ever imagined any sex could ever have been in the entire history of sex.

  Oh.

  No.

  She brought her fingertips to her lips, and the swollen flesh there seemed to be the catalyst to the kind of coital aftermath about which legendary songs were written. The memories hit her full force, a series of snapshots built from little glimpses, as if she knew somehow that in the bright light of day she wouldn’t be able to handle anything more. Actually, she couldn’t handle this. She just kept seeing his mouth against her skin, closing on her breast, his teeth and tongue creating insane friction across that aching peak, and the shudder that crawled over her as she sat there alone in the bed was dangerously close to orgasmic.

  “You’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” she muttered to no one in particular, trying in vain to rub away a case of the chills that had nothing to do with the air temperature. Evidently, she was going to sit there and do all the sputtering and facing of the insanity she should have done the night before, but had been ousted in favor of stretching between the sheets, the cool fabric divine against her hot, sore, sex-ravaged muscles. And she couldn’t exactly claim innocence. She hadn’t been able to claw her way close enough.

  At that moment, however, there was no distance great enough. She had no idea how she’d face him. She could already picture him out there in one of those silk playboy smoking jackets, an unlit cigar in his hand and a smirk on his face. He’d probably already used a chainsaw to notch his headboard. What was she going to do?

  She groaned and fell back against the pillows.

  Then inspiration hit and she promptly sat back up. His morning-afters were probably filled with goddesses with glamorously tousled hair and makeup that had somehow perfectly lasted
the night. That wouldn’t be her on her very best day, but it gave her an idea.

  Feeling somewhat motivated, she climbed out of bed, stretched her gloriously sore muscles, and dug into her toiletry bag for a face mask. Avocado green. Sexy. She slathered it on, then found her sleep pants with the sheep print and the red wine stain that seemingly placed one poor lamb in the center of a crime scene. She already wore an oversize T-shirt, so old and faded that she couldn’t remember what had been on the front. One messy ponytail later, she was ready to face Matt. Or, at least, as ready as she could ever be, considering her insides still quaked from the force of the orgasm he’d given her.

  The smell of bacon frying hit her as soon as she cracked open the door, the evidence that he was there and expecting her managing to destroy a chunk of her bravado. She’d held a slight hope that he wouldn’t be there, about how much easier that would have been, but no, she wanted to face him and get this over with. It wasn’t as if she’d crawled into his bed, dragged him from sleep, and begged him for anything. He’d been there for it, and he was far more experienced than she, so odds were he hadn’t given it a second thought. Maybe he would just assume she hadn’t, either.

  Steeling her resolve, she pulled open the door and tried to act casual, which mostly resulted in her sauntering into the kitchen with all the grace of a broken marionette.

  Matt was frying bacon shirtless, so he was either a heathen or showing off. Probably a bit of both. “Good mor—” His gaze fixed on her pea green face and he froze. And he stayed that way until the bacon popped, at which point he absently rubbed a spot on his stomach and finally blinked.

  Lexi tried to do the same, but she was staring down a man who knew how to do sex better than any other in existence, and now his washboard abs were flavored with bacon.

  “Good mor to you, too,” she said, dragging her attention north of his waistband. This was going to be so much harder than she thought. And with that, her gaze dipped again, to the land of blissfully hard things.

  “Sorry. I just didn’t expect… You look…” He hesitated, then gave a shit-eating grin. “Edible.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Great. Grab a fork and pull up a chair. You can eat me instead of breakfast.”

  He froze. At which point she realized the absolute horror of what she’d said, and how there wasn’t enough avocado in the world for her to hide from it.

  Fortunately, the bacon diverted his attention, but not before an interminable moment passed. He scooped it out of the pan, cracked in a pair of eggs, and asked, “What exactly is on your face?”

  “It’s an avocado mask.”

  “Okay.” He didn’t seem to know what to do with that information, but it had been kind of a dead-end question. “Got any more of it?”

  Or maybe not. “For what? Your toast?”

  “No, my face.”

  She blinked. Twice. “You want a face mask?”

  He flipped the eggs and shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

  She didn’t exactly have an answer for that, so she went after the mask, returned with the tube, and stood in front of him, suddenly not sure what to do with her hands. They needed something to keep them busy, otherwise she was going to have to touch his face.

  Evidently unconcerned by any of this, he finished with the plates, placed them on the table, and looked expectantly at her.

  “So…you just…wipe it on,” she stammered, attempting to hand him the tube.

  He closed his fingers over hers, tightening her hold on the mask. “How about you do it?”

  “Okay.” Not okay. Not okay. She managed to keep her hand from shaking, but not the heat from her face. Fortunately that was covered. Quickly, she swiped the gunk against his skin, and absolutely did not have a flashback to her fingertips dragging against his jaw while his mouth worked against her skin, sucking and licking and—

  “You can do both sides,” he said mildly, and she realized she’d done only a small area before she’d gotten distracted, and probably now stood there with her eyes glazed, her neck red, and avocado likely melting off her inferno of a face.

  “Sorry,” she mumbled, smearing some on the other side. When she called it done, he looked more like he’d wandered into the jungle for war games than someone who wanted to be deeply moisturized, but he wouldn’t know that until he looked in the mirror, so she dropped the tube and retreated to the other side of the table, relieved to sit with an entire table between her and Matt.

  He reached for the coffeepot—his maker now sat next to her Keurig—and poured a cup before going into the fridge and grabbing the orange juice, which he sat in front of her before grabbing a glass to place beside it. All while she sat there like a green idiot, alternately staring between the trail of hair peeking north of his low-slung waistband and his hands, which should have been relatively safe—a decidedly non-carnal topic, that—but they’d touched her. They’d touched the hell out of her, and there was no dodging that awareness.

  “I’m taking Elsie shopping,” Lexi said when he sat. “Then this afternoon my parents are expecting us for lunch. Do you still want to…I mean after…” Yep, she was the absolute picture of post-coital grace.

  Matt’s brow hitched. She suspected it had done so out of amusement, but rather than delivering a punch line, he delivered a blow. “You aren’t seeing Dave today?”

  Who? That was her first thought. Then she remembered. She and Dave had already decided they were keeping things on the level of friendship. Prior to that decision, they hadn’t even kissed, but Matt didn’t know that. And he certainly didn’t know that the reason she’d seen so much of Dave was because she’d volunteered to help with the police department’s community outreach program. She kept that part to herself.

  Because if she wasn’t mistaken, Matt Freeman and his giant vat of oats to sow was jealous.

  “No. Again, I’m taking Elsie out to get her groceries. Are you…coming?” Not the greatest choice of words, but she probably wouldn’t have died saying them if she hadn’t immediately thereafter looked down at the table, which hid his lap.

  He gave her what might have been a heated look if not for the fact that it was splotched with green. “I’m still trying to recover from the last time I saw Elsie. If I recall, you were otherwise occupied at the time, so—”

  “My parents, Matt. Are you still coming with me after…” Oh, what she wouldn’t give to string together a complete sentence.

  He cleared his throat. “Yes.”

  She didn’t say anything while he stabbed at his eggs, moving them around the plate without actually attempting to eat anything. The seconds ticked by like decades. Finally, he asked, “Don’t you think maybe we should talk about what happened?”

  Lexi responded by popping an entire strip of bacon into her mouth and chewing slower than she ever had in her life. She felt like they’d done nothing but talk about it, even though neither one had said a direct word. And what could she say? That it had been amazing? That she wasn’t sure anything would ever feel so right again, like, ever? That she strongly suspected she was in for a lifetime of guys who had no chance of measuring up?

  She looked at him, her best friend with the goop on his face, the man who’d never made the scantest allusion to wanting to be a husband or a father, and felt a hole in her heart that made the Grand Canyon look like a crack in the sidewalk.

  With a shrug of such badly feigned indifference that she probably would have been laughed out of a middle school theater class, she said, “It was bound to happen. We got it out of our systems. It’s over. There’s nothing to talk about.”

  It was the worst truth she’d ever told.

  …

  Nothing to talk about?

  The hell there wasn’t.

  Matt wasn’t sure what he’d expected Lexi to say, but it wasn’t that. But what could he say? That he wanted to keep having sex with her? That he wanted no
thing more than to see her sprawled in his bed, preferably naked and not covered in avocado? That he couldn’t stop thinking about what they’d done, and all the things they hadn’t, and how much he wanted to do each and every one of them?

  He’d spent the entire night alternating between dreaming about her and waking to find he had a kickstand problem, which led him to think about her, which led to more dreaming and the gut-wrenching realization that he’d yet to see her stripped of clothes. She sat in front of him wearing an old shirt with a piece of egg stuck to the front and pants with some kind of murdered farm animal on them, and all he could think of was relieving her of every thread. The relentless need to feel those smooth limbs sliding against his, slick and hot against cool sheets, already haunted him. He couldn’t fathom a lifetime spent without intimate knowledge of every beautiful inch of that woman. He felt like he’d barely touched her, yet no one had ever touched him more.

  How could she be done?

  Not that it mattered. Maybe in her world, sweaty, disheveled, and against the wall didn’t require much of an encore—and if he didn’t do another worthwhile thing in his life, he’d respect that.

  He’d respect her.

  He stood, rinsed his dishes, and swallowed back a decade of regrets. That maybe things could have been different—that maybe he could have wanted different things—if he’d ever seen what he had in front of him, but that was water under a very high bridge, and not even the Hoover Dam had a prayer of holding that back.

  It was what it was.

  “I’m going to the station to get in a workout,” he said, doing his damnedest not to see the flash of hurt in her eyes. But she’d handed him his escape, so what could he do but walk? “I’ll meet you at your parents’ later.”

  Then he went to wash off the god-awful avocado and wished to hell he could do the same for the memory of her touch.

  Chapter Twelve

  Things could have gone better with Matt. Lexi regretted not telling him she wanted to swan dive into his bed and spend an eternity there, but Matt’s bed always had an expiration date. However long it lasted, he’d be ready to move on long before she was. They’d be over. Or maybe they already were, because she’d never had a more awkward conversation in her life, and that was before she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror and saw how she’d looked in that mask with the egg on her shirt. And also before he’d taken the out she’d offered and run with it, not that she could blame him.