Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,86

between us. But that was when his fingers started skimming over my shoulder.

It was a light, tentative caress, but it definitely did not feel like a gesture of comfort. My breath hitched in my throat and my pulse fluttered.

Surely I was misinterpreting things. Luke was just holding a damsel in distress and trying to make her feel better. I was reading things into that soft movement of his fingers, things that couldn’t possibly be there. If Luke were interested in me in that way, he’d have shown it long before now.

Whatever the meaning of that gentle touch, I didn’t have the willpower to pull away while he was doing it. I lay still, almost frozen in his arms, willing him to keep doing it, practically holding my breath. He stirred beside me, turning his body slightly more toward me, and I felt a brief pressure on the top of my head.

Did he just kiss me?

No way. That must have been his chin brushing the top of my head as he changed position. He just hadn’t been able to avoid my head because it was resting against his shoulder.

But it hadn’t felt like a chin. A chin was hard and bony, and that was not at all what I’d felt pressing into my hair.

Maybe he’d thought it was just another reassuring gesture. Maybe his mom had kissed the top of his head when he was a little kid, and he thought that was what you did when you wanted to comfort someone.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want it to be something more. It was just that I was terrified of getting my hopes up—or making a fool of myself. We spent every night cooped up in the same house together, and if I acted like he was coming on to me and I was wrong, I didn’t know how I could bear the humiliation of it.

There was that pressure on my head again. It lasted longer this time, long enough for me to hyperanalyze the sensation and determine that yes, that was a kiss.

Luke’s fingers moved slowly from my shoulder to the bare skin of my neck, and goose bumps erupted all over my body. His touch skimmed up to my face, his hand deliciously warm against my chilled skin.

I could bend, twist, and otherwise contort the kiss on the top of the head into a gesture of comfort, but there was no way to misinterpret this as anything but a caress. I swallowed hard, hardly daring to believe this was happening—and almost panicked with the realization that I had no idea what to do. The sum total of my experience with boys was an uncomfortable date at my junior prom with the son of one of my dad’s friends. We hadn’t known each other, and it turned out we were both equally shy, which made for stilted, awkward conversation. We’d kissed when he dropped me off at home, but only because we thought we ought to, not because we particularly wanted to.

Luke cupped my chin and gently tipped my face up toward his. His eyes were huge and dark, and there was an intensity in them I’d never seen before. There was no question that he was going to kiss me, and not on the top of the head this time, and I fought a swell of panic. He was used to kissing Piper, who had never been shy and never lacked confidence. She also had considerable experience by the time she and Luke started dating. There was no way I could measure up to that standard, no way I could set myself up for a comparison with Piper and come out the winner.

There was also no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to kiss Luke, no matter how potentially complicated it would make things between us in the future.

The first brush of his lips against mine was surprisingly tentative. He’d always seemed to me like a good match for Piper in the confidence department. He wasn’t as much of an extrovert as she was, but I’d never seen much in the way of self-consciousness.

Stop thinking about Piper! I commanded myself.

Luke deepened the kiss, his lips stroking more firmly, his mouth open. I drank it all in: the warmth and softness of his lips, the scent of his skin, the gentle rasp of his five o’clock shadow. Technically I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was like a dance, and I was happy to