He caressed her cheek with one warm hand and she closed her eyes again. She wanted to savor the moment, but she couldn’t stand not seeing him, so she looked again. She soaked him in.
What was happening between them? Tiffani sometimes felt she had read every advice column in existence on dating and marriage. She had read every book and every magazine trying to figure out what was wrong with her that her husband cheated on her as easily as he breathed, what was wrong with her that she had fallen for someone so obviously untrustworthy, what was wrong with her that she stayed in love with him through so many heartbreaks.
She had always been looking for the way she was broken. Always been looking for the key mistake that she had made.
But that was her old self. Maybe her new self was right: there had been no one mistake. Just a series of bad decisions, made out of fear and her own low self-esteem.
He won’t hurt you. He won’t lie to you. He’s one of the good guys. Hell, he’s the good guy.
The guy too good to be true? How could he possibly like her as much, and as quickly, as she liked him? Didn’t he realize the gulf that was between them?
She had been telling herself that she deserved some fun. Some romance.
She had never told herself that she deserved love.
You met him this morning, Tiffani reminded herself. Pace yourself.
Except she strongly suspected pacing oneself was overrated. She wasn’t a project to be perfected, not this time. Not now. She was a person with wants and needs and the gumption—could she think of a better word than gumption? She really wanted to—to fill them.
Maybe she did know what she was doing, if she could just be brave enough to do it.
Maybe it wouldn’t be a mistake to fall for Martin so fast that she could almost hear the whoosh of her heart dropping into his hands. Maybe, despite everything that scared her, she was making the best choice for her heart.
And maybe she trusted him to be making the best choice for his.
What she said next wasn’t the key to everything she wanted, but at the moment, it felt like a very acceptable shortcut.
“Kiss me.”
Martin did.
Sirens.
She took the time to luxuriate in his mouth, in the taste of him and the way he yielded to her kiss and persuaded her at once to yield to his in return, the way he soon reduced her bones to water. She could have collapsed in a heap at his feet if only she didn’t have so much to do, so much of him to touch.
His stomach muscles were hard and taut underneath her hands. She unbuttoned his shirt slowly and pushed his ribbed white undershirt up so she could slide her touch underneath it. He peeled it off over his head, somehow maneuvering the gesture so that they never broke contact.
His arms! They had to qualify as one of the wonders of the world. He could have lifted her no problem. Her body throbbed, some switch in her suddenly flipping over to pure greediness to be touched.
She was nothing but hunger.
Martin realized it at once. For the second time that day, he took her out of that sensible blouse, his fingers awkward but sure against the little pearl buttons. He stroked her breasts through the tough silk of her bra. It was so close to what she wanted and yet so stupidly far away that she heard herself make this absurd keening sound out of neediness and frustration. He was teasing her.
Martin bit very gently at her neck as he put his arms around her to undo the bra clasp at her back.
Then his tongue was hot and wet and masterful against one of her nipples, leaving the other one to be expertly rolled and stroked and pinched by his fingers. For a second, Tiffani thought she would fall apart just from that. Could she really come without him so much as touching her throbbing sex?
“You’re so soft,” Martin said, leaning back from her for a moment. “Your skin is so soft.”
“Well,” Tiffani said absurdly. “I use good soap.”
He laughed and she felt the little puff of air from it on her sensitive, flushed breasts. She made another ridiculous sound.
They kissed and touched their way to the bedroom. This time she was the one who first succeeded at getting the other undressed. She felt a kind of fierce, somehow primitive victory in that, as though she had won a battle and Martin was her prize.
He lay back on the bed and she straddled him, her knees to either side of his hips. As soon as she could, she sank down onto him. It was better on the bed than it would have been in the car, she thought distantly. Here there was no fear of getting caught or bumping the gearshift, here there was nothing to distract her from how delicious this was.
True to what she’d told him before, her skirt was too long to do this easily. She had had to thrust its waistband all the way up to just under her breasts to straddle him. Even then, bunched up around her waist, the skirt edged forward and fell down low. It kept brushing against both of them as she moved. She was too busy working her body on his to care.