anticipation that made her limbs feel weak and her stomach clench tight. She took her hands off the steering wheel and shook them, as if she could release the nervous energy through the ends of her fingers.
A little shiver ran through her and she got out of the truck, taking every step a little bit harder than necessary, as though it might ground her a little bit.
She took a deep breath before knocking on the door, and then she waited. She didn’t hear anything. No footsteps, no sounds of clattering pans. Great. He was probably hiding. He had probably found some nice sexually experienced girl to do some real acrobatics with.
She was being intentionally dramatic, but even still the very thought made her feel like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The door opened and she jumped, then her focus went straight to his bare chest, which was right at her eye level. Her mouth dried and she let herself slowly, very slowly, take in the view before her. Gage was shirtless, and he was wearing a pair of very low-slung jeans that showed off his hard-cut abs and a matching pair of glorious indents that seem to make an arrow that disappeared beneath the denim, drawing her eye right down to the bulge at the apex of his thighs.
Well, this was what she gave up, making love to him in the dark. She had only thought of herself, of protecting her dignity and all of that. She hadn’t really appreciated what all she was missing by denying herself the sight of his body.
“I’m pretty sure you’re violating a health code,” she said, her words scratchy as she tried to force them through her terminally dry throat. “Wandering around the kitchen half-dressed.”
She looked up at his face then, at the extremely self-satisfied and unapologetic look in his eyes. “But you like it,” he said.
She couldn’t really argue with that, but still, she tried to keep her expression stoic. She breezed past him and walking into the house. “I want to make sure my food’s preparation is up to standard.”
He reached out, grabbing hold of her wrists and drawing her hands forward, pressing her palms against his bare chest. “You like me like this.”
“Sure,” she said, going up on her tiptoes and kissing his lips, a rush of pleasure and regret racing through her as soon as she finished. It was a little bit too telling, both to him and herself for her to start acting all affectionate. But she was desperate to taste him. So maybe that was more sexual than it was affectionate.
She needed lines. Unfortunately, every available line seemed to be blurry. Because sex felt good, and made her want to feel good more often. Heaven knew she had too little of it in her life. Then there was the fact that every inch of him pressed against every inch of her made her feel warm all over, made her feel like curling her toes just thinking about it. Which made her want to touch him, in some capacity, in any capacity, every time she saw him.
Which started to feel a lot more like closeness than simple physicality. Blurry damn lines.
“I don’t want to brag, but I’m actually a pretty good cook. It comes from years of being on the road and making do with incredibly Spartan situations. I’m the MacGyver of cooking.”
“Does that mean you made a tortilla out of a paperclip?”
He laughed. “Not quite. But, if it exists I’ve probably cooked it on a camp stove. So what I made for you tonight is skillet macaroni and cheese with bacon, a salad, just so we don’t feel guilty, and I bought a pie from your friend Alison.”
“Oh,” she said, not quite sure how she felt about him getting in the middle of her life like that. Her real life. It was easy, up here at the lake, to feel separate from everything that happened in town. That her store, her friends, all of that was somehow a different life. Even the Gage she dealt with in the professional capacity could be a different one than her lover. But not if he was going to keep blurring all the lines.
Again with the blurry lines.
“I suggest you start with the macaroni and cheese, skip the salad and go straight to the pie.”
“Then why did you make the salad?”
“The appearance of virtue.”
She laughed, in spite of herself, in spite of all the jumbled-up messed-up feelings rolling around