Wanted to taste it even more.
By the time they finished the registers he was so wound up he was ready to drag her off to a corner and kiss her until breathing was optional. They agreed to take a break since he had to test the circuits he’d created and he needed to connect the control pad to the program he wrote. She brought him back to the furniture section and he spread out on one of the coffee tables.
Hip-deep in code, he didn’t realize how long she’d been gone until the quick shock of cold on his neck made him flinch. She held out a bottle of soda with a knowing grin. “How’s it going, genius?”
“Almost got it.”
“Good, because you’ve been poring over this for an hour.”
“Oh shit. Really?”
She nodded and covered her mouth as a huge yawn overtook her. “Definitely. It’s after midnight.”
He stretched his arms out and gathered everything. “I think we’re good to give it a try.”
She took his mini-laptop and left him with the circuit boards. “Let’s get going.”
Darcy caught herself mid-yawn again. She’d worked on a few outstanding displays she never seemed to have enough time for during her regular shift but kept an eye on Ben. He was focused—frowning over his screen, pushing back his hair, jamming his pencil between his teeth. Very distracting.
He looked massive and yet somehow comfortable on the floor. With all his bulky muscles, he was oddly graceful. And more than able to sit in one spot without moving. He didn’t have a fidgety nature, which was probably key since he had to hold weird positions for long blocks of time as a tattoo artist. She couldn’t stop staring at his long, graceful fingers.
And that was the path to destruction.
Every time he touched her, she wanted more.
She’d never been a sexual creature before, but around him she couldn’t stop thinking about just what he could do with those artist hands. And maybe he was right. Whatever she’d done and whomever she’d been with before—it wasn’t Ben.
It was a heady feeling.
And downright hard to define. She was used to meeting someone, dating, waiting at least a few weeks before she thought about taking a man to bed. With Ben, all she could think about was getting him against any available flat surface. After that kiss earlier, she could only imagine what he’d do if he was focused on her with unlimited space and time.
Just her and just him.
“So tell me, Darcy. Why oh why do you hate Christmas?”
“Do we really need to go over that again?”
“Yep. Because I’m about to make you love it. And I want to know why it sucks so hard in your opinion.”
“Making it beautiful won’t make it less of a pain in the butt. I’ve never really been all that into it. My mom always worked through the holiday. And for her, Christmas was her only day off. It was hard to celebrate when she was so exhausted. So it just became another day. And then I started working retail, and that was all she wrote.”
“But wouldn’t it be the day to celebrate that you got to spend time with your mom?”
“She was so exhausted she usually slept most of the day.”
He frowned. “You didn’t leap on her bed with bouncing blonde pigtails and demand to see what Santa brought you?”
She stopped a few feet away from the front of the store. “Santa made a really small pit stop at my house, and when I figured out he didn’t exist, well…I couldn’t see making my mom spend unnecessarily on me.”
She hadn’t meant to say so much.
What was it about Ben Hartley that made her do things that were so out of character? He didn’t need to know her sob story. What a way to kill the mood. He moved into her space and she froze. Now he was going to feel sorry for her. She was asking for a night alone the way she was going.
He lifted her chin with his finger. There was sadness in his deep, dark eyes but there was also a steady calmness. “I come from a single-parent home too.” He kept his eyes open as he leaned in. The kiss was sweet and slow. Like their first kiss, it was spring-breeze soft. Her eyes drifted shut and she fell into his taste. He kept it light and she followed his lead. Content to drift on the gentleness in his touch, she sighed when he drew back.
“I’m going to make you love Christmas again.”
She reached up to cup his face. “How about you make my store look like Christmas on crack and we’ll be even.”