Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,150
marry Elise Maxwell.
Though that was too creepy and intense a declaration to make so soon. So he would amend that thought: from here on out, he was making it his mission to be the kind of man that Elise would want to marry. Someday. Eventually. There was no hurry—another side effect of the no-kids thing was that there was no ticking clock hanging over them.
Oh, they were going to have so much fun. A lifetime of fun.
It was a weird feeling, imagining with such calm certainty a future in which he was married to a woman he had yet to have sex with.
His phone buzzed, drawing him out of his fantasies.
Elise: On my way.
Shit. He hadn’t replied to her last text, so consumed had he been by his own swooning.
Jay: Sorry I disappeared for a minute there. Re birth control: we can do whatever makes you comfortable.
He grinned and added a final thought.
Jay: And hurry.
By the time the doorman was calling up to Jay’s to tell him she was on the way up, Elise had lost some of her nerve. Her time with Jay had been one extended, scorching bout of foreplay. But then it had been derailed by her period. Would it be like an actual train derailment, where the momentum was all gone and they had to somehow get themselves going again? A bit of self-doubt started to worm its way into her mind.
Okay, more than a bit. A lot of self-doubt. At her worst, on the worst days of the worst months, she felt broken. The feeling always passed. But she’d let him see her like that, at a low—if not at her absolute worst—which somehow felt more intimate than the prospect of having sex with him.
The elevator made its way up to the eighteenth floor, each peppy ding an ice pick that chipped open the pit in her stomach a little bit more.
There was also the part where she hadn’t done this for a long time. And, to be honest, she hadn’t ever slept with someone she liked so much.
Which was a dumb revelation, because she’d had long-term boyfriends before.
There was just something about Jay that made the stakes feel ridiculously high. Jay blew every other man she’d ever met out of the water.
She paused outside his door. Well, paused wasn’t the right word, really. It was more like balked. She had her hand up, poised to knock and everything. But what was she going to say to him? What if she—
She hadn’t knocked, but the door suddenly swung open almost violently. He surged forward for a second, before he registered that she was standing right there. Then he reared back so as not to crash into her. But he’d overcorrected, and he had to grab the door frame so he didn’t fall over backward.
It should have been funny. She probably would have laughed. She was pretty sure that’s why she had opened her mouth—to laugh. But then he grabbed her and pulled her to him, making her reconsider.
Maybe she’d actually opened her mouth so she could stand up on her tiptoes and press it over his. So she could slide her tongue inside without any prelude so that they were finally—finally—kissing.
He groaned and took control. One hand came to the back of her head, the other snaked around her waist, and he feasted on her. His lips were hot and demanding, and as his tongue battled hers, her mind lurched back to the Dirty Scrabble game. To his threat to lick her clit, specifically. It suddenly felt like he already had: moisture pooled between her legs, and she rolled her hips in search of desperately needed pressure. Her first attempt was thwarted by their height difference, and she only managed to grind up against the front of one of his thighs. It was pressure, but not focused enough, not hard enough. It was almost worse in a way, because all it did was ratchet her need up even higher. “Unnh.” The frustrated moan slipped out as she tried again to mash herself against him.
“Look at you,” he muttered as he pulled her into the apartment, which put some distance between them, distance that she did not want. “So frustrated. So beautiful.” He kicked the door shut.
She bared her teeth at him because frustrated hit it on the nose—though it occurred to her that this move probably wasn’t reinforcing the whole beautiful thing.
“Aww.” He took her hand. “How can I make it better?”