“Still a tease,” she says with a nip to my bottom lip. Her nails dig half moons into my chest over my shirt.
“Still impatient,” I reply, caught between wanting to laugh and fall to my knees. Reacquaint myself with every square inch of her.
“I swear to god, if you don’t touch me, I’ll—”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. I cup her in my hands and squeeze, my thumbs dragging slow and sure against the cotton of her bra. I feel it when her breath stutters, a quick rise and fall beneath my touch. I want bare skin. I want more of those sounds. I grip the center of her bra and yank the material down until it’s twisted beneath her breasts, watching my hands grip and smooth and pluck beneath her shirt.
“You’ll what?” I ask.
“I’ll be—” her eyelashes flutter, a half-smile curling her lips. “I’ll be so mad.”
“Hm.”
She turns her face and catches my mouth again, my hands working under her shirt. I rub my thumbs across her nipples until she makes the panting sound I like best, her hands gripping at my jaw in silent demand. I wrap one arm low around her waist and hitch her closer. I want her body against mine, her softness everywhere I’m hard. Her nails scratch into my beard and I stumble forward, backing her into the table. I vaguely notice my coffee mug tip over the edge and land on the rug with a muted thunk. I’ll look at that stain every day and remember exactly this. Evelyn gasping against my lips, her knee hitching high against my hip.
I drop my forehead to her shoulder and brush a kiss there, my hand slipping from her breast to her hip. I squeeze once and try to get myself under control. “We should stop,” I mumble. “Talk.”
This has always been the easy part—letting the sparks between us catch and burn. It’s everything else we need to sort out. I like her body, but I like everything else more. And I don’t want her to think this is all I want.
She nods, hands slipping beneath my shirt to scratch at my back. I arch into her and trap her hips with mine, flattening her to the table. “Yeah.”
I nose at the collar of her shirt until I can reach the skin where her shoulder meets her neck and suck a lingering kiss there. She’s sweet with a touch of salt I know will stay on my tongue for days. I drag my face down her chest until I can catch her nipple between my teeth through the fabric of her shirt.
I can’t stop touching her, tasting her.
“Excellent talking,” Evelyn breathes around a laugh, her hand at the back of my head holding me to her. “Very best talk I’ve ever had.”
I drop my forehead between her breasts and press a kiss there. “I want to take you out.”
“Okay,” she pants, pulling on the hem of my shirt until I relent and tug it over my head. I immediately catch her lips in a kiss again, my hands at her thighs. I urge her up until she’s sitting on the tabletop, legs wide, her foot curling around the back of my knee. My fingers find the ends of those damn socks and I trace the thick cotton, a groan in the back of my throat.
“We’ll get dinner,” I say against her mouth. Her hands squeeze my ass and I thrust against her once. Her head drops back, long dark hair gliding over the tabletop like spilled ink. Christ, but she makes me crazy. Scrambles all my plans until I’m mindless with her. I roll my hips against her and drop my head to watch the way we move together. “I’ll bring you flowers.”
“Flowers, huh?”
She chases my touch, her hips circling just right. I hum and nod.
“Pretty ones. It’ll be a date.”
Her hands lose their grip on my body and she drops back to the tabletop with a happy sigh. The heat between us shifts and settles into something softer. I let my fingers play at the outside of her thighs, trace the thin white scar I haven’t forgotten. She kicks her feet back and forth and cocks her head to the side, looking at me through half-lidded eyes. She smiles something sweet with her ruby red lips—a little bit of beard burn on her chin and neck.
“I like you, Evie,” I straighten her shirt and drop a single, chaste kiss to the tip of her nose. My heart begins a gallop in my chest. “I like you a lot.”
Her smile lights up every damn corner of this room. The shadowed parts of me, too, and all the pieces I keep to myself.
“I like you, too,” she tells me. She kicks me lightly and chews on her bottom lip. “Now put your shirt on or we’ll have sex on this table.”
I collapse overtop of her with a groan. She cards her fingers through my hair with a laugh, tugging once at the ends.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I grumble. I can already picture it. The way the legs of the table would creak and groan. Our clothes moved just enough for friction and heat and blissful relief. I try to adjust myself as delicately as possible, but I still hear her snicker.
“I want that date,” she tells me, voice soft. A little bit dreamy. “Maybe this is our do-over. A chance to do things differently.”
There’s simple honesty there, a thin thread of hope from her heart to mine. I reach for her hand and tangle our fingers together. I’m pretty sure I’d do things any which way with Evelyn, as long as we ended up like this. My chin resting on her chest and a smile on her pretty face.
“Yeah?”
She nods. “Yeah.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EVELYN
Not much changes after our furious make-out in the kitchen.
Despite slamming his body against a kitchen appliance and kissing him like I’ve been thinking about nothing else, we continue to act as if nothing has changed. We have dinner together on the porch every night. He leaves me notes on the kitchen counter. I steal his socks. We exchange long, heated stares over the rims of our coffee mugs in the morning, a perfectly polite three feet of distance between us.
It is both wonderful and exceedingly annoying.
I like Beckett. I like his half-smiles and the way his voice deepens and scratches early in the morning, the gentle brush of his fingertips across my shoulder as I slip past him in the kitchen. I like the calendar he keeps taped to the side of his fridge, his family’s important dates scribbled down in red. I like that he’s always taking care of everyone around him, from the cats to his sisters to the pastries Barney demands from atop the tractor.
I like the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention. The softness he tries to hide.
I’m looking forward to our date, whenever he decides to follow through on that particular promise.
I’m also looking forward to throwing him down on the nearest flat surface and having my way with him.
I’ve caught him staring at the kitchen table a couple of times since that morning, his thumb at his bottom lip and a look of deep concentration on his serious face. I’ve caught myself staring at it, too.
My restraint is hanging on by a thread, bolstered only by Beckett’s extended time in the greenhouse. He disappears there every free moment he has, mumbling something about making space and clearing clutter. Spring cleaning, he says.
Nothing to do with a duck.
But I’ve seen four packages arrive this week and I know the man isn’t buying duck food for himself. The smallest box contained a tiny little golfer’s hat with a bright red poof on top that Beckett snatched away as soon as he saw me with it, his cheeks a furious shade of pink.