Mother, Please! - By Brenda Novak & Jill Shalvis & Alison Kent Page 0,76
and slipping his fingers beneath.
This time the sound she made was one of hunger and need. She tore her mouth away from his and begged. “David, please. Let’s go inside. My mother could come out any minute. Please, I don’t want—”
He silenced her with a finger to her lips. And then he shook his head. “I’m late for class. I’ve got to go.” He took a deep, shuddering breath and rested his forehead on hers. “Besides, going inside means going to bed. And I’m not sure we’re ready.”
She shut her eyes tightly, not wanting to hear what he was saying because she knew that he was right. Just because they fit together on the staircase—
“Avery, look at me.”
She did, and her heart went wild.
“I didn’t say that I didn’t want you.” He pressed her lower body flush to his and made his meaning known. “I want you more than I want to breathe right now. But I’ve got to go.”
She nodded because it seemed like an obvious response and he’d robbed her of the ability to speak. Wanting her more than he wanted to breathe. She swallowed and found enough of her voice to say, “I know.”
But he wasn’t through. “What do you know?”
“That you have to get to class.”
“And?” he asked, one brow lifted.
She felt the heat sure to be splotching her cheeks bright pink. “That you want me.”
He exhaled as if she’d freed him from a fifteen-year-old burden. “Good. Now. Dinner. Tonight, yes? We’ll pick this up again where we left off.”
“Okay,” she agreed, nodding. “I can meet you wherever you’d like.”
“Your choice,” he said, his eyes sparkling with an intensity that was nothing if not deliciously, wickedly, all about sex. “Your place or mine.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“OH, THANK GOODNESS,” Avery said, opening her front door to her mother later that evening. She took the fresh tomato Suzannah offered from the palm of her hand. “I picked up two tomatoes this afternoon and both are as mealy as wet bran.”
“Bran? And here all this time I’ve been thinking of you as the Cheerios type,” Suzannah said teasingly.
Heading back to the kitchen, Avery glanced over her shoulder and grinned at her mother trailing behind. “That’s because you still look at me as your little girl.”
“Well, of course I do. The younger you are, the younger I am,” Suzannah said with a laugh that Avery didn’t find convincing.
She washed the tomato and pulled a chef’s knife from the block on her navy-tiled countertop. “And here all this time I’ve been thinking that you considered age to be nothing but a state of mind.”
“True. But there are times I can’t help but wish I was your age again with so much time still ahead of me.” Leaning a shoulder on the archway separating the kitchen and dining areas, Suzannah crossed her arms.
Frowning, Avery cubed the tomato and told herself not to worry. But her mother remained silent, and by the time she scooped up the handful of tiny chunks and tossed them into the bowl of shredded lettuce, Suzannah’s scrutiny had intensified fourscore and seven.
Enough was enough. Avery rinsed her hands and reached for a dish towel, drying as she asked, “Mom? What’s going on here?”
Suzannah considered her daughter from head to toe, then shrugged and pushed away from the archway. “I’ve decided you’re not the Cheerios type after all.”
Mothers! Argh! “What is that supposed to mean?”
“Seeing you preparing dinner for David certainly doesn’t have me thinking of you as a little girl.”
Avery shook her head and turned back to setting the table with her aqua stoneware, relieved her mother’s moodiness was about something so simple. “You act like I’ve never cooked dinner for a man before.”
“You’ve never cooked dinner for David.”
Placing flatware on napkins beside the plates, Avery couldn’t deny the flicker of anticipation brought on by her mother’s comment and the memory of the stolen moments she and David had shared earlier that day. For a moment she simply stared at the muted colors of her reflection in the brushed silver of the knives, forks and spoons atop the ivory linen napkins.
She turned her gaze to Suzannah. “It’s funny that after so many years it would be David making me nervous. I’m worried about getting this right. I guess it’s because this is the first real date I’ve had in a year.”
“Then you’re guessing wrong. What you’re feeling is all about David.”
Her mother was far too intuitive. The tightness in Avery’s chest intensified. “I owe him so much.”