“Because I want your support. Yours and Eli’s.”
She snorts, dabbing her eyes. “We know Eli’s all for it.”
“True. He’s already planning our double wedding with him and Luke. He’s over the moon. I want you to be, too, June.”
Crossing the small space between us, she hugs me tight, her voice hoarse as she kisses my temple. “If anyone deserves a happy ending, it’s you.” She smacks my butt as I run out of the bathroom. “Now go be naughty!”
Chapter 14
Playlist: “Under the Christmas Lights,” Gwen Stefani
Heart aglow, I bound down the stairs of my apartment building, burst out of the door, and launch myself into Jonathan’s arms.
He laughs, warm and deep, as he kisses my cheeks, my nose, my mouth. “I missed you,” he says. “Worst fifteen minutes ever.”
“Felt like fifteen days.” I smile up at him, taking his hand when he offers it so I can step over another snowbank and into my seat in his SUV.
Jonathan drives, and we bicker. I complain about him observing the speed limits when there’s just a little snow on the road and I desperately want to be at his place, already naked. He reminds me that he’s very much on board with being at his place and already naked, but I’m the one who demanded a pit-stop. Honestly, after behaving ourselves for two weeks, it feels great. It feels like slipping into my softest shirt and under my coziest blanket—familiar and safe and right.
“Satisfied?” he says, throwing the car into park.
“Not yet.” Climbing the center console, I straddle his lap the way I wanted to the first time he drove me home. “But soon I will be.”
Jonathan can’t even hide his smile as I slip my hands up his shirt, careful of his infusion site above his hip, and tease his stomach and chest. His eyes drift shut as I kiss my way up his throat, his jaw, his cheekbones, then the corner of his mouth. “I nearly ran a red light back there,” he mutters, slipping his hands down my hips to my backside, caressing, kneading “Thanks to you and your sexual demands.”
“You like my sexual demands.”
“I do,” he admits, moving me against him where he’s hard and straining against his slacks. “But I’d like them better upstairs on the bed in front of the fire.”
I wrench myself away, tumbling like a lopsided snowball back onto my seat and throwing open the door. “Hurry up!”
Laughing, Jonathan runs around the car and sweeps me into his arms. I wrap myself around him like an oversized koala as he unlocks his building’s door and jogs up the stairs. “Impressive fitness,” I tell him.
“Hockey’s good for something.”
“Running up a flight of stairs with your sexually demanding woman and not being breathless?”
He arches an eyebrow as he opens the door to his place. “Yes, but more generally—” He kicks the door shut behind us. “Stamina.”
With the push of a remote button, flames dance to life in his apartment’s living room fireplace.
“Wow,” I whisper.
He grins and says, “Hold that thought.”
In an impressive display of strength, Jonathan drags his low platform bed from its corner in the studio space, across the room, until it rests, covered in cozy blankets right in front of the fire.
Before I can say a word, Jonathan slips my coat off of my shoulders, then hangs it up. Pressing a featherlight kiss to my neck, he breathes me in. I sigh, letting my head fall back on his shoulder, how I’ve wanted to. His arms wrap around me from behind as I reach back and palm him over the hard, thick outline of his erection.
“I want you so bad, I can barely see straight,” he says roughly.
“That festive firecracker at work got you horny?” I whisper. “With her generous hips and bedhead curls and a penchant for pushing your buttons?”
He groans a laugh. “It’s like you speak from experience or something. Got a colleague you’ve been hot for?”
“You drive me wild.” I spin in his arms and growl the words against his mouth as we kiss, biting his lip. “You are designed to make me feral.”
He clasps my face and kisses me again, hard and hungry, walking us toward the bed. “You have no idea.”
“I want to know.”
“From the moment I realized the statistical likelihood that MCAT was you,” he says between kisses, “given all the overlapping circumstances and evidence, I’ve been gone. All I’d been repressing around you, Gabriella”—kiss—“all I’d denied myself from imagining with MCAT”—kiss—“coalesced. I’ve been wrecked. I had to watch you walk around the store and glare at me, still hating my guts. And then I had to go home and beat off in the shower every night because you made me furious and so fucking hard.”