Good Girl (Love Unexpectedly 2)

I want to turn toward him. I want to kiss him. More, I want him to kiss me.

Instead, I do something even riskier.

My pinky finger extends outward slightly until it finds his. I feel Noah stiffen, and immediately I pull my hand back, but slowly, as though the touch was an accident and I’m not aware of it.

Which is crap, because I’m totally aware of it. That’s how it is with this guy—a split second of pinky-to-pinky contact and I’m practically vibrating with want.

Except tonight it’s not physical want (although that’s certainly there lurking in the background).

Tonight, though, I want intimacy more.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I want someone to care.

I don’t know where the thought is coming from. I have plenty of people who care about me. I’ve never been that girl who begs others to like me, love me, adore me.

But damn it, I want Noah Maxwell to care about me. I want a tiny bit of tenderness from this rough, gruff guy who most of the time can barely stand me.

Keep dreaming, princess, I tell myself in a mocking version of his harsh, drawling timbre.

But then I really must be dreaming, because his hand moves, hovering above mine with only a split second of hesitation before it closes over mine gently but authoritatively.

I bite my lip to fight the smile, but it comes all the same.

“Don’t make it weird, princess,” he says gruffly.

Well, of course I’m going to make it weird after that. I unabashedly twist my hand so that I can twine my fingers with his.

“Is this weird?” I say with fake innocence.

“Yes,” he mutters. But he doesn’t pull his hand away. And though I don’t turn my head to look at him…I’m pretty sure he’s smiling.

Just like me.

Noah

If someone was to ask me what the catalyst was for finally dealing with my bitch of an ex, I wouldn’t have said it was holding hands with Jenny Dawson, superstar, in the back of my friend’s truck, outside a house I didn’t even know I owned up until a month ago.

But that’s exactly how it’s played out.

It’s been two weeks since I spent all night holding hands and talking with Jenny until we fell asleep beneath the stars. Yup, you’re hearing that right. All that, and I didn’t even screw her. Not that night, at least.

Since then, though, I’ve been seeing plenty of Jenny, in bed and out.

And for reasons I have zero interest in dwelling on, I’m in my car on the way to Yvonne’s apartment.

Here’s the thing you need to know about Yvonne Damascus: she’s one of those women who has completely different standards for how she actually lives her life versus how she wants people to think she lives her life.

Case in point: the woman screws like a crazy, kinky monkey but refuses to “live in sin.”

Messed up, right?

I mean, granted, she hasn’t fucked me in a long time. The last time we had sex was a couple of months ago, after she made a sloppy, white-wine-fueled come-on that I couldn’t bring myself to resist considering I was gearing up to walk d

own the aisle with the woman.

I’d like to blame our shitty sex life for her cheating on me, and I’m sure that was a big part of it, but I can’t say I wasn’t equally to blame. At some point I just…quit caring. Somewhere in the middle of her berating me for not wanting French haute cuisine small plates as our wedding meal and us fighting about my reluctance to settle into an office job, I just…lost interest.

But I didn’t cheat.