I could feel immediate hesitation. His surprise against my mouth. He tilted his head, allowing me to kiss him, but he didn’t kiss me back. His lips moved, but it wasn’t quite a kiss, and when he pulled away to look at me, to stare deep into my eyes, I felt a second of red-faced regret.
But then I heard the light thump of his suitcase dropping to the floor, and with both hands cupping my face, he kissed me back.
His tongue swept with an instant hunger through my mouth as he backed me against the wall, pressing me against it then hoisting me up on his body. Wrapping my bare legs around his waist, he pressed his warm chest to mine, forcing my heartbeat to flutter frantically against his as he kissed me deeply, his tongue rough and shameless, pulsing and laving against mine, and devouring me so feverishly that fiery excitement ricocheted in my chest, bouncing around like a wild creature that had been waiting forever to be unleashed.
And just as I felt it, Iain squeezed me, like he could feel it too.
For what felt like forever, we just kissed, and when he finally pulled away, his chest was heaving, and his eyes were bright, unblinking on me. For once, he looked a little unprepared, like he’d been caught off guard, and it made me break into a smile.
His eyes still moved all over my face—from my eyes to my nose to my lips as he let me back down. And once my feet were firmly back on the ground, I put my focus on straightening his tie, smoothing my hands over his shirt, giving myself the excuse to feel all that hard muscle under my palms before looking back up in his eyes.
“Have a good day at work,” I murmured as he tipped my chin up to study me.
But before I could fully melt under the weight of his stare, he kissed me again.
Softer this time.
He said goodbye close to my lips, his eyes seeming like they didn’t want to look away. But then finally they did, and he was gone, leaving me to stand all alone in the hotel room, smiling giddily to myself, and quietly overflowing with this feeling of warmth that brought me back to a place I probably wasn’t supposed to be, because I wasn’t supposed to be this enamored with Iain Thorn again. I wasn’t supposed to lose myself in another all-consuming crush.
But as I chewed the corner of my grinning lips, I reasoned that it was a completely different situation this time.
And beyond that, I just couldn’t help myself.
18
IAIN
Four hours after parting ways with Holland and I was in Boston, in an entirely different hotel room.
By now, an hour flight, a drive and half a meeting’s worth of prep with my team had passed.
And yet I was still thinking about her lips.
In a sun-drenched suite overlooking the waterfront, I sat among a handful of my staff, reviewing the thick black binders packed with all the informa
tion we needed to negotiate a record contract extension this afternoon. It had taken a thirty-man research team two weeks to prepare this data, and at this very moment, I was supposed to be locked into it, my head focused strictly on numbers. Numbers like Boston’s team payroll and budget, their franchise value and revenue, their statistical chances at a World Series and how all that was directly affected by my client’s star performance on the team. That was what I was supposed to be thinking about.
But instead, my mind was on Holland’s lips. The fucking adorable look in her eyes as she ran to me with that pillow hugged to her chest.
Sex with her was unlike anything I’d ever felt in my life, but it was the kiss that had me effectively fucked.
I’d already accepted the instantaneous response my body had to hers. The fact that she could get me hard as a rock in about two seconds flat. My cock was addicted to Holland Maxwell, and I could live with that, but I wasn’t so sure how I felt about the fact that she could find her way into my head with just a kiss.
She’d mind-fucked me with that kiss. Made me feel like I’d just come home from a long day of work when in fact I was about to leave.
It made me ache for once to hang back. To be somewhere besides work. And as disturbing a feeling as that was, it somehow made me feel good too—in a way I knew I wasn’t supposed to have, because I didn’t allow myself to have this feeling anymore. The feeling of being satisfied. Fulfilled. I’d cut myself off years ago, for good reason.
But the clarity of that reason was blurring today.
And try as I might, I couldn’t seem to recapture it.
“Hey, folks. Car leaves for Fenway in fifteen.” Erica poked her head in to give us the time check. “How is everyone feeling?”
“Great,” everyone replied, myself included.
And despite the state of my mind, I actually meant it.
Because with or without the distractions, I knew I had this negotiation in the bag. I’d been fully familiarized with all the data and financials for months, and I knew well that I was going to leave Boston with a beyond lucrative extension for my client.