Maggie Shayne - An Enchanted Season

“Let’s not question this, okay? Let’s not analyze it or talk about it or, God forbid, waste it. Let’s just enjoy it. Right now. In the moment. Can we do that?”

He had yet to meet a woman capable of any such thing. Then again, he thought, he had yet to meet a woman quite like this one.

“I can do that,” he said softly. And now he got a little braver, reached out with his fingers to stroke a wisp of a blond curl from her cheek. And then he paused with that curl in his fingers, rubbing it. So soft. And her cheek, even softer. “Can you?”

“I’ve spent my entire life living in the moment. It’s the only way I got through, sometimes.”

He felt the surprise rinse through him at that admission—the admission that she had ever been less than perfectly happy. It was something he didn’t imagine she let a lot of people see. And then he looked at her, really looked at her, and he saw beyond the happy, new age, positive-energy-spouting hippie. He saw a woman who’d been gutted, just like he had been. She was empty, and searching for something to fill that emptiness. She was vulnerable and needier than she knew. And right now, what she needed was him.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t handle being quite that needed.

He stroked her cheek once more, then leaned closer, and pressed his lips to it. “I can’t, Holly. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes slammed closed. White teeth bit down on her lower lip. She rolled onto her back and flung a forearm over her face, probably to hide it from him. “It’s okay. I understand.”

“I’ll probably regret it for the rest of my life, if that’s any consolation.”

“It’s not, ’cause I will, too.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“You should be.”

“It’s not that I’m not…attracted to you.”

“Well, duh.”

He frowned at her—well, toward her. She still had her arm over her face. “I don’t follow.”

“By ‘well, duh,’ I mean, ‘obviously you’re attracted to me’ and ‘who wouldn’t be, anyway?’”

“Any man in his right mind would be,” he said. “Maybe I just see more than they would.”

“Suddenly the Grinch is Mister Insight?” she asked. “This oughtta be good.”

“Would be, but I’m not going there. You going to be able to sleep?”

“Not much else to do,” she replied. Then she rolled onto her side, away from him, punched her pillow as if it had done something to make her very angry, and lay still.

“I’m sorry, Holly.”

“Stop saying that.”

He sighed, tried to relax into the pillow, and closed his eyes. But he wasn’t a bit sleepy. Mostly, his mind was busy conjuring what it would have been like. What he could have been doing, right then, instead of lying there, bored, wide-awake, and turned on in spite of himself.

Yep. He was an idiot.

EVENTUALLY, SHE SLEPT. SHE WASN’T SURE HOW. SHE’Dbeen pretty much embarrassed to the roots of her hair to have offered herself to him so blatantly, only to have him turn her down cold.

Damn. She’d thought she had more sex appeal than that.

At any rate, she lay there stewing and frustrated until, finally, sleep had claimed her. And it seemed that sleep had its own ideas about what the two of them would and would not be doing in the comfort of the sofa bed.

Because when she opened her eyes, and she saw him opening his, they were lying, face to face. Close enough to kiss. They were tangled together. Her arms were around his neck. His were around her waist. Her leg was over his, his upper one was in between hers.

And before she could move, he was kissing her. Eyes falling closed, mouth moving to capture hers, arms curling tighter, pulling her closer.

“You don’t have to…” she whispered when his lips slid from hers to her neck. And once he started kissing her neck, it was all over. That was her weak spot, right there. She thought wildly that she even liked his morning breath. It wasn’t bad. Just real. Raw.

“I have to,” he muttered against her skin. “Trust me, I have to.”

She didn’t have to be told twice. She arched her hips toward his, and he pushed back, then pressed her onto her back and slid his hand down the front of her pajama bottoms. She scrambled out of them to give him better access. Then she tugged at his clothes as they kissed some more, wrestling his T-shirt over his head. He pulled her pajama top free of its buttons, pushed it off her shoulders. And then his mouth was moving from hers, down her neck to her chest. She shivered when he found her breasts, mouthed them, suckled them.

Pleasure shot through her like fire through a dry forest. Heat so intense she thought she might go up in flames. He touched her, then his hand slid between her legs, not hesitantly, not timidly, but eagerly. And he groaned at the heat and wetness he felt there.

She arched against his hand, silently pleading for more, and he didn’t make her wait. He rolled on top of her, slid inside her, and she quivered and sighed as he filled her. The sensation grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go. She tipped her hips up to his and took all of him, until he drove the very breath from her lungs. And then again and again. He kept on kissing her the entire time they twisted and writhed and pressed into each other. Straining, reaching, taking, and giving. And all the while his mouth took hers. He kissed her as if he loved kissing her. As if he didn’t want to stop. No man had ever done that before—kissed her all the way through sex. Open-mouthed, hungry, wet kisses. As if he wanted to devour her. As if he couldn’t get enough.

It made her feel more wanted than she had ever felt in her life. And she wondered where he’d been hiding all this passion, all this fire. Thank God he wasn’t hiding it now.

His hands slid underneath her backside, to hold her to him, tilt her up to take him, and he drove even deeper, and faster, and his kisses became more desperate. He was pushing her toward climax, and she reached for it, ached for it. And then, suddenly, he pulled back just slightly, tried to slow his pace.

“No,” she whispered. “No, Matthew, don’t stop.”

“But I’m—”

“So am I.”

She clutched his hips and rode him, moving against him as the wave crested, and crashed to the shore. Her entire body shuddered in sweet anguished ecstasy. She clung and she cried out, and then he was doing the same as he drove deep and held there, throbbing inside her.

They clung that way for a long time, and he kissed her again and again as her body sank into the most relaxed state of bliss she had ever felt. He withdrew after a time, rolling onto his side, pulling her close into his arms. She snuggled against him, content and sated.

Moments ticked past. Long moments as her body just hummed.

“We’re very different people, you and I,” he said eventually.

She stayed where she was, warm and cozy in his arms. “We have a lot in common, too, though. Not that I’m saying we have to, or—”

“I know.” He sighed. She felt the rise and fall of his chest, his breath in her hair. Maybe she wasn’t entirely sated just yet, she thought with a secret smile. “We had similar tragedies, centered around the holidays, when we were kids. But we reacted in entirely different ways.”

“Will you tell me now? About that first Christmas without your dad?”

He was silent for a long moment. So long she began to think he wasn’t going to answer her at all. And then he said, “Dad had this hat. This old felt hat he wore everywhere.”

“Not a fedora,” she whispered.

“Yeah. A black felt fedora. He always told me he’d give it to me one day. Like it was some kind of an heirloom or something. It was an inside joke between us.”