need to climax. He took her orgasmic cries into his mouth as her body shook against his.
He gentled his kiss and his touch as she calmed. Her breathing slowed and her lashes swept up, her gaze on his face. They looked at each other, and reality whomped Vance on the side of the head.
Oh, hell. With a silent groan and an aching body, he rolled to his back beside her, no longer touching her. What a way to lose his head!
She was so sweet and tempting and desirable and...
He gritted his teeth. And off-limits.
Layla cleared her throat, a nervous sound. “Um, hey. Do you... Don’t you...” Her fingers brushed his arm. “We can—”
“No,” Vance said. “I— No.”
“But—”
“It just seems smarter to keep it simpler, don’t you think?”
She cleared her throat. “Sure, but it doesn’t seem fair—”
“I’ll be fine.” Tortured, but he deserved it. With a surreptitious movement he made an adjustment to his still-tight jeans. Yeah, he was going to hurt for a while, but it was a fitting punishment for letting his own impulses get away from himself. For allowing Layla to come, thus creating only more complications.
* * *
MIDMORNING OF PICNIC DAY, Layla let Vance drive the Karma Cupcakes truck to the Smith ranch and wished she’d roped Addy into attending, as well. If the other woman had also been in the vehicle, Layla would have had a cheerful companion. Someone to talk to.
Someone who wasn’t brooding in silence.
The silent brooder was Vance, of course, and she might entirely chalk it up to the upcoming interaction with his family if he hadn’t been in a distinctly preoccupied mood since that night they’d watched for the green flash. Her stomach tightened at the memory of what had gone on under the blanket, and she snuck a look at the stony-faced man behind the wheel.
Okay, she glared at him a little. It wasn’t that she could blame him for a moment of it—well, of course he was responsible for every kiss, every caress, every jolt of sweet satisfaction—because the true guilty party wasn’t a person at all. It was the magnetism that had pulled them together from the very first. That attraction that had burned her fingertips and made her insides melt like heated marshmallows even now.
As if he felt her gaze, he glanced over.
Just like that, it happened. A string seemed to tether them together, and it pulled tighter the longer they looked at each other. Her belly clenched again, and Layla pressed one leg against the other, trying to dissipate the ache between them. Vance’s jaw tightened and she saw his lips press into a taut line.
Unfortunately, that only sent her mind to the incredible moment on the cliff when he’d taken his fingertips straight from her body to his mouth. He’d made a little sound of appreciation as he’d absorbed her taste, and her skin had flamed with both a deep embarrassment and an almost uncivilized surge of desire.
God, she thought now, feeling an echo of that heat radiating from her bones outward. The unselfconscious lustiness of the gesture had been so...so male.
As Vance directed his attention out the windshield again, she allowed herself a little shiver. She needed some outlet for the sensual pressure bottled inside her.
Vance cleared his throat. “You’re cold? I can turn down the air-conditioning.”
“No.” She almost laughed. He’d posed that question before, and she hadn’t been trembling due to the chilly temperature then, either. It was as if she had a sexual furnace inside her, one that was constantly stoked by the smallest things. The flex of his long thigh muscle as he braked into the next sharp curve. The gold tips of his hair, longer than it had been when they’d first moved into No. 9. The look of his lean fingers as they gripped the steering wheel. His right arm was lifted to the two o’clock position, while the left, the one with the cast, lay in his lap. Two fingertips rested on the bottom curve of the wheel.
She imagined herself sucking them. Then sucking him.
Shocked by the thought—in broad daylight! In the cupcake truck!—she made a little noise. When he glanced over, she whipped her head toward the passenger window.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
Maybe she should just get it out into the open. You put strange thoughts in my head. I woke up last night hot and restless. I want to taste you. His quiet mood didn’t invite confessions, however. And he hadn’t mentioned anything about their sunset interlude himself