A burst of happy adrenaline surged through her as they clattered through the door. “Keep going!” she whispered as they tore through the dining room and skidded around the sharp turn they had to make to mount the staircase.
“Go, go!” he urged, and she let loose a peal of laughter as they raced up the stairs. She couldn’t keep it in anymore.
She hadn’t been thinking about where they were going other than away from Karl. But of course they were going to her room on the third floor. It was the only place they would be guaranteed privacy. They laughed all the way up. Jake had a low, rumbly chuckle that scratched not unpleasantly against something tender inside her.
When they reached her door, she had to drop his hand to fish her key out of her pocket. Well, she had to drop his hand because their little caper was over. Because that was the only reason she’d been holding it in the first place.
Wow, though, she missed it. Like, already. But also in the broader sense. She missed physical touch. Affection. She should probably wonder how much of it coming from Rufus in recent months—years?—had been genuine, but going down that road wasn’t going to be productive.
“Well, we showed him,” Jake quipped, his eyes twinkling. “We should be spies.”
That was another thing she missed: being in cahoots with someone. Feeling like it was you and your coconspirator against the world. It had been a long time since she’d had that with anyone, unless you counted the illicit pizzas she ordered for Maya.
Jake ran his liberated hand through his hair. Which drew her attention to both that damn hand and his ridiculously attractive hair.
Heat pooled low in her belly.
She had thought she was going to be dead inside for a long time. Or at least for the five months Erin had informed her was her allotted get-over-Rufus window. But in fact, like on that night on Jake’s deck when she’d laid her head on his shoulder, it suddenly felt like something inside her was waking from a long hibernation. Something she’d thought was dead had been only, it turned out, dormant.
She sighed and glanced at Jake as she unlocked her door. He grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her.
He was only doing it because, like her, he was enjoying the echoes of their covert operation.
Right?
His eyes slid down her body, but he jerked them back up, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
She looked down at herself. She’d tried to spiff herself up for the auction, so she was wearing a dress. It was a wrap style that closed in front like a robe. It was low cut—lower than the dresses she wore at the clinic—but she was pretty flat chested, so the cleavage effect wasn’t as dramatic as it would have been on someone else. But things had gone a little askew during their dash upstairs, and the V had shifted so she was showing quite a bit of side-boob on one side—one of the downsides of small breasts was that there wasn’t a lot of terrain there to keep the necklines of dresses like this one from shifting out of place.
All the mirth had gone from Jake’s expression. His eyes were no longer twinkling. But they hadn’t returned to normal, either. They were doing…something else.
Well.
“Jake?”
He went into the tiny room and set the pizza on the dressing table. “Yep?”
She wasn’t really sure how she had the guts to ask what she was about to ask. Maybe because he wasn’t looking at her. He was unloading a thermos from his backpack—that must be the bourbon.
She followed him in and closed the door behind her. “You know how you don’t have room in your life for a relationship?”
He froze with his back to her, the thermos in one hand, its cap in the other. She thought back to the first time she’d laid eyes on him, at the salon. She’d thought of it then like a record scratch, a sudden interruption in the normal soundtrack of her life. This felt like that, too. Like the record of their friendship had been playing as normal, the needle traveling in an orderly fashion along its groove. But now she was going to ask him a question that would jostle the needle, and somehow they both knew it, even though she hadn’t actually said anything yet.
The room shimmered with tension as he slowly set the thermos and cap on the dressing table and turned. “Yeah?”
She swallowed hard. “What about sex? Do you have room in your life for sex?”
He looked at her for a long time. Another thing she’d thought earlier about Jake was that he did companionable silence well.
This silence was not companionable.
Crap. She had majorly effed up here. What the hell had she been thinking? Clearly she hadn’t been, otherwise—
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
She blinked, unable to move anything besides her eyelids as those four words, delivered in his gruff baritone, unleashed a tsunami of exhilaration, fear, and lust inside her body.
She was so focused inwardly, on tsunami abatement, that she hardly even perceived his approach until he was there with a hand on one of her cheeks and his mouth on the other.
The hand was familiar. As when she’d had it in her own downstairs, it was warm and a little bit rough. It was big, too. With his palm at her jawline, it covered the whole side of her face, and his fingers extended up past her hairline.
His lips were warm and a little bit rough, too. He’d pressed them to the middle of her other cheek and was now dragging them down her throat. Her pulse was so strong there, she worried she was coming across like a lust-addled idiot.
He took a step closer. He’d been touching her face with his hand and his mouth, but now their bodies were aligned. His free hand snaked around her waist and pulled her against him.
He was hard. He was really hard. It was unmistakable, right there against the soft center of her belly. She could only surmise that he’d done that on purpose, that he wanted her to feel him.
“Now?” she croaked. “We’re doing this now?”
He pulled away, and she immediately regretted the question. Because it had made him pull away. She’d lost the lips and the hand and the heated hardness.
A slow, semiwicked smile blossomed on his face. “Did you want to schedule it for later?”
“No. I mean, maybe. I mean maybe also later.” His brow knit. She was making a hash of this, sending mixed signals. She cleared her throat. “Jake. Let’s have sex now, but maybe also later, if that ends up being something we both want to do.”
He got the trying-to-hold-back-laughter look from before as he pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows.
“Do you have a condom?” she asked.
“Why would I have a condom?” He did laugh then, as if the idea of his being in possession of a condom was so preposterous, the only reasonable response was to laugh.
She rolled her eyes but she laughed, too, and it went a long way toward easing her nerves. “I don’t know. Don’t you have a bunch of them in a bag made of leather you tanned yourself from a deer you killed yourself?”
“Do you have a condom?” he countered.
“Why would I have a condom?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re young, hot, and single?”
“You think I’m hot?”
He raised his eyebrows and glanced pointedly down at the rather impressively sized bulge at the front of his jeans.
She couldn’t have wiped the grin from her face if she tried.