waist and up under her top, seeking and finding her bra fastening; then, with another groan, closing his hands over her naked breasts.
And God that felt good, so good she writhed on him, squeezing, and abruptly he pushed her backward and fell on her, arching so that he could latch his mouth to her breast and still fuck her. And she loved it.
Cradling his head to her breast, she wound her legs around his hips, pushed against his mouth, and thrust wildly with him. As one, they rushed headlong for what they couldn’t stop, panting, their bodies grinding and grasping for release. It took them together, hurling them into orgasm. He collapsed on her, shouting out, and somehow the full weight of him pinning her to the table intensified her joy. Her legs went slack, drooping off the end of the table like a rag doll’s.
She hung on to him, listening to the gradual calming of their breaths as orgasm faded to sweet, gentle contentment. Adam lifted his face from her neck, propping himself up on his elbows, and although he smiled down at her, he was scanning her face for signs, she thought, of hurt, or regret.
“All right?” he murmured.
She began to laugh softly, tightening her grip around his neck. “Mr. A, you have a gift for understatement.”
Grinning, he eased himself off her and out of her, stripping off the condom before refastening his jeans with a mocking flourish. Only then did he reach down to pull her upright and then sat down with her in his lap.
He dropped the condom with its wrapper into the nearby bin. “Sorry. I planned a much more romantic and gradual seduction. You do things to me, JK.”
“Are you really?” she asked uncertainly.
“Really what?”
“Sorry.”
His eyes widened. “Fuck, no,” he said and kissed her mouth.
Chapter Twenty-one
Edinburgh was having one of its glorious moments. The sun shone down on the city from a bright, cold, blue sky, as if spreading Jilly’s unexpected new happiness to the world at large. After a long pub lunch with wine, when they discussed everything and nothing, Jilly and Adam strolled hand in hand through Prince’s Street Gardens. She’d seen so many couples doing this over the years and yet never imagined she’d be one of them.
The castle stood out with sharp clarity, dark but unmenacing in its ancient familiarity. Jilly gazed up at it, wondering how many such miracles it had seen as this closeness, this contentment she felt in Adam’s company right now. She felt like she had in Chicago when neither of them wanted to leave the game, only more so. The contrast to her acute discomfort when he’d first walked into her kitchen could hardly have been greater.
“You came to the hospital,” he observed. “The first day I was allowed to see anyone. But you never came in to see me.”
“I got as far as the window to your room,” she confessed. “You already had a visitor.”
“So you ran away from Roxy?”
“Sera asked me the same thing,” Jilly remembered.
“Roxy said she liked you, that you got on well.”
Jilly shrugged. “As well as a rock star can with a mad woman who almost broke into her hotel room to ask impertinent questions. I wasn’t avoiding her. I wasn’t even jealous. Or at least not very.”
She glanced up at him and swung his hand with frustration. “The sight of her just made me realise some stuff, as if she was a symbol of your real life. She was so cut up, being here, facing up to your death… And when I saw her with you, I knew whatever we’d had just wasn’t real to you. That if we’d met in reality, you’d never even have looked at me.”
He stopped and turned her to face him. “JK. I’m looking.”
“Only because we met as we did,” Jilly insisted. “If you’d been alive and visiting Dale when Sera and I turned up to sort out his poltergeist, you wouldn’t even have noticed me, except perhaps as a mindless bit of skirt to ogle when your wife wasn’t looking.”
He blinked. “Is that what Dale did?”
She touched her forehead to his shoulder. “More or less. It’s what I set myself up for. Look, admire if you like but don’t touch. I told you, I’m totally messed up.”
He bent and kissed her lips. “You’re beautiful,” he murmured. He brought his hand up to cup her cheek and kissed her again.
****
Even something as mundane as food shopping turned out to be fun in Adam’s company.