“Yes, actually,” I said, leaning forward with a grin. Her blonde ponytail hung loosely over her shoulder, and she was in the same outfit I’d seen her in that first night, when she’d sent an electrical current running over my skin with one look. “Given how you were as a kid. You ran around undercutting me like a little know-it-all.”
“Only because I did know it all,” she said without missing a beat or cracking a smile. I blinked, and then the two of us burst out laughing.
We talked for a while longer, going through a bit more beer before we both decided to call it a night. She hadn’t stopped sassing me for a second, and with every pointed word, she’d only become more beautiful.
I walked her out into the winter night and around the corner to where I’d parked my own truck behind hers.
“I had a really good time tonight,” she said, looking up at me and tilting her head to the side.
“Me too,” I said, leaning down to give her a good-night kiss on the cheek. Or, at least, I’d been aiming for her cheek. I didn’t know whether she’d moved accidentally or on purpose, but my mouth landed on hers, and suddenly, my friendly peck goodnight had become so much more.
She sucked in a deep breath at the contact but didn’t pull away. Instead, she relaxed into the kiss, moving her hands up to my shoulders as she did so.
“Luce,” I said into her mouth, and her lips parted under mine as she pressed her fingers into me. She pressed her teeth gently into my bottom lip in response, and that was all I needed to drive me into a frenzy.
I pressed into her, pushing her backward so that she was held between every line of my body and the hard side of my truck. I reached for her hands, bringing them up so that I held them tightly as I pressed harder into her. I was already rock hard, and my jeans were pressing abrasively against my cock.
“Lucy,” I said again, “I want you. Can we—”
“Now. Please,” she said breathily into my mouth.
I reached over her shoulder, pulling on the handle of the passenger side door as I continued to kiss her. Pulling her forward a little, I ensured the door didn’t hit her as I pulled it open and lifted her onto the front seat, following her inside.
19
LUCY
Girl, are you fucking serious?
This was the mantra of my subconscious as I slid backward into the front seat of Austin’s truck, watching him as he crawled up and in after me, prowling like a panther.
Everything had the pleasant, fuzzy haze that a few beers usually brought to an evening, but I knew that I wasn’t nearly drunk enough to pin tonight’s choices on how much I’d been drinking.
This wasn’t about a drunken hookup. This wasn’t about a strange, inherent knowledge that Austin would be just as intense and driven about this as he was about everything else.
It also wasn’t about the way that Aaron had been acting around me today. I had no desire to hurt him, or punish him, and I’d known that he’d removed himself from my vicinity so that we could both act as professionally as possible.
No, what it came down to was that, somehow, Austin and I had been heading toward this moment since we’d been kids. Like back when I was following him around and dogging him with random facts about horses and sheepdogs, and he’d rolled his eyes at me while barely able to hide the smile that played around the corner of his lips.
I pushed away all the subconscious voices in my head and pulled him up so that he covered me completely. He was tall too, but he was narrower in the shoulders and hips, settling into my frame the way a key settled into a lock. He groaned as he settled against me, pulling one of my legs up and draping it over his hip so that he was able to press himself even more tightly to me. I groaned at the feeling of him pressing into me, and he sucked at the skin on my neck eagerly, moving his lips down so that he peppered my throat with kisses.
“Hard—to believe,” I gasped as he kissed me, reaching back and pressing my hands against the driver’s-side door, “that that little know-it-all and the guy she annoyed would end up here.”
“I love that you know it all,” he said, his voice pitched so low it was practically a growl as his mouth hovered over the line where my camisole cut across my breast. “Your smart mouth is my favorite thing about you.”
I didn’t know whether my blush was from his words or from the truly wicked things that he was doing with his mouth, but either way, I felt the blood rush up to my skin, and I gasped harder as I pulled him even tighter against me.