It was only supposed to be one little kiss. Two sets of lips pressed together for a few seconds. That’s what it should have been. But what was supposed to be, and what was, turned out to be two completely different things…
Nate
It was only supposed to be one little kiss. Two sets of lips pressed together for a few seconds, all for the sake of charity. That’s what it should have been. Easy peasy. But what was supposed to be and what was turned out to be two completely different things and here I was a month later, still thinking about that damn kiss.
But it wasn’t just a kiss and it wasn’t just the kiss that kept me distracted and horny. It was the woman herself. Mikki Mahoney. Four weeks ago, she’d strolled up to the kissing booth and slammed a twenty-dollar bill on the counter with more attitude than was necessary. I recognized it for what it was: false bravado. The curvy little shop owner had something to prove, more to herself than to me, and that had intrigued the hell out of me. It was the only explanation for what had happened next.
“What’s this?” I glanced down at the cash, with a smirk curling my lips and my arms folded across my chest.
Mikki squared delicate shoulders, laid bare in a figure-hugging green dress that made her hazel eyes look like liquid gold, and looked me right in the eyes. “That would be money, sugar. As required by the rules of the kissing booth, unless I’m mistaken?” The fake innocence dripping from her sexy southern drawl was irresistible and I leaned in real close.
“It’s double the cost of a kiss. Does that mean you’re looking for two kisses, Mikki?”
We’d been circling each other pretty much since she’d arrived in Tulip, but it hadn’t been clear until that moment whether we would kill each other or end up naked and sweaty together.
She rolled her eyes and fisted both hands on her curvy hips, a move that accentuated her hourglass figure. A move that made my mouth go dry. Instantly. “No, it means I want you to make this one kiss worth the cost of two, since this is for charity, after all.”
Dammit, that sass had done it for me in a big damn way—more so on that hot summer day, especially when her pink tongue snaked out and slicked across plump, pink lips. “I do aim to please.”
“That’s what I hear.” The teasing quality had left her voice and Mikki took a step back. “So?”
Was that a challenge I heard in her voice? It definitely was, and I was a man who couldn’t resist a challenge, particularly one as tempting as the Mississippi transplant. “Just figurin’ out the best plan of attack.”
She snorted a laugh that was as sexy as it was annoying. “Press lips together and kiss,” she suggested sarcastically. “Maybe your reputation is nothing more than exaggeration.”
Her disappointed tone hit me with the force of a fist straight to my gut. And my ego. When she turned to walk away, leaving the twenty-dollar bill on the surface between us, my hand reached out and wrapped around her wrist.
She turned and eyed me skeptically before attempting to flay me with that chilly glare of hers. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Nate Callahan?”
“I’m proving to you that nothing about me is an exaggeration.” It was a cheesy-ass line and we both knew it, but before anyone—including the peanut gallery nearby—could say another word, my lips were on Mikki’s.
The kiss had started out tentative, both of us trying to get to know each other, our likes and dislikes, before deepening the kiss. At least, I’d thought that was the plan, but Mikki’s tongue scraped across my bottom lip and then my top lip, taking advantage of my surprise to slip inside my mouth and steal my next breath. Correction, my next fifty breaths.
She was a wildcat underneath that proper southern belle routine she put on for the people of Tulip and her customers, but that kiss told another story, and when our tongues touched, I knew how this would end. It was the only way it possibly could end, with the sparks shooting off between us and electricity arcing between our bodies. One of her hands tangled in my hair and pulled me close and my own hands went to her slender waist, sliding down to those hips I’d been thinking about for weeks. I gripped