skin, puckered her nipples, and caused an unholy kind of clenching deep between her legs.
She’d had sex that wasn’t anywhere near as good as Cole Hauser’s kisses.
Jane inched her body closer on the step, wanting to be closer, wanting to feel his heat and hardness, map his chest and his abs and run her hands over his thighs. She shimmied her hips and wriggled her bottom, straining to get closer and closer but stopping just shy, millimeters between their shoulders and arms and thighs, because touching him now, in this state of…desperation, could be fatal.
After four nights of this, there was a wild and desperate urge riding her, and touching him with anything other than her mouth felt far too risky. Who knew what chain reaction that could set off? Who knew where it would end?
As if he could feel her reticence to push any further, Cole didn’t encroach on the slither of space between them, either, keeping to his side of it as she kept to hers, his hands gripped firmly around his beer, her hands similarly occupied, just their heads leaning in, their mouths fused in a wicked kind of frenzy.
“Jane…” he muttered, lifting his mouth briefly before pressing his lips to one corner of her mouth, then the other, his tongue swiping between the two points, lingering in the middle to sample the bow of her upper lip. The sensation streaked to her nipples, and Jane moaned, her mouth opening, then claiming his, banishing his teasing and replacing it with something far deeper and dirtier that streaked a hell of a lot lower.
God this was crazy. So crazy. She wanted to throw her leg over him and straddle him and grind herself against him; she wanted to ride him like a cowgirl on these steps and feel him bucking up into her, bucking them all the way to orgasm. Jane was so damn hot for him she was dizzy and shaking and breathless. She had to stop or she was going to touch him, and then they were both doomed.
Wrenching away, Jane forced herself to stare out over the yard again as she took a swallow of her beer, welcoming the coolness of the ale to her overheated system. Cole did the same, and they sat there for long moments with only their ragged breathing between them.
So much for her big-girl panties…
If only she didn’t feel so damn…alive. She hadn’t realized she’d been merely existing until now. Just putting one foot in front of the other, checking off mental lists.
Be a great mom. Be a good boss. Stay friends with her ex. Grow the business. Take some risks but not too many. Make the rent. Pay her bills. Pay her taxes. Put something aside for a rainy day. Oh, and don’t forget to floss.
And then a guy she didn’t know had crawled into her bed, started looking after her son and sucking face with her every night, and suddenly, her days had become alive with delicious possibilities.
Which was madness.
This was just a blip, a temporary blip, and then it’d all be over. She’d be back to mental lists and the treadmill of a working mom. So she really needed to cut this—whatever this was—off at the knees because she didn’t want to get too used to Cole Hauser or his mouth. Even now, she was battling the urge to toss her bottle of beer on the grass and climb all over him.
Standing abruptly, she turned and placed her foot on the step above, needing to flee before she did something she knew would have an irreversible impact. If she let herself want this man too much, she might never survive him leaving.
“So that’s what we’re going to do now, you and me?”
Jane’s foot was on the next step when his question halted her progress. She glanced down at him, their gazes locking.
“We’re just going to…sit out here every night and kiss like a pair of horny fifteen-year-olds?”
The right answer was no, absolutely not. But it was exactly what they’d been doing. And now that she was about to flee the scene, once again, the seductive thought that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if they could keep it to just kissing reared its head. Maybe kissing allowed them to blow off some steam without getting into anything too serious.
Like straddling and grinding and groping.
“I don’t know.” Jane was still a little breathless, which gave her voice a husky kind of vibrato. “Maybe.” That was only being honest,