“Yeah, I think they’ve figured that out by now.”
She stared at me across the room. “So why wereyouthere?”
I wanted to hold her gaze and lie, but I couldn’t do it. It was either tell her the truth or look away, and fuck me if I didn’t want to look away.
“Maybe I was jealous too.”
“You don’t even like me.” She sounded so sad that I wanted to take back every harsh word I’d ever said to her. Every time I’d made her feel guilty about Evelyn or unwelcome in the house.
“I never said I didn’t like you.” The darkness in the courtroom had created a strange kind of intimacy. I was saying too much.
Revealing too much.
“It’s obvious,” she said.
I pushed off the judge’s bench and crossed the distance between us. When I came to a stop, she was only inches away. My dick stirred in my jeans, the scent of sweet apples blowing through my body like a warm autumn breeze.
She was more than pretty. She was fucking addicting. I wanted to soak her up: her face, her smell… everything.
I looked down at her. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem.”
Her breath had turned shallow, her chest rising and falling fast enough that I could see it. “Are you saying you… like me?”
“I don’t know you enough to like you… but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you.” The first part wasn’t entirely true. I liked the way she lit up a room. I liked the way she smelled like apples. I liked the way she said ridiculous things to avoid swearing. “Do you like me?”
Why was my fucking voice so gruff? And why did I care about her answer?
“I don’t know you enough to like you.”
I held my breath, praying there was more coming.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you,” she said.
I took a step toward her, colliding with the softness of her body, and smashed my lips onto hers.
32
AVERY
Kissing Beck waslike sinking into a luscious piece of cake. Kissing Noah was like falling back onto soft grass in summer.
But kissing Dane? Kissing Dane was like having all the thoughts that held me hostage smashed to bits by a giant hammer.
It should have been painful, destructive.
Instead it was freeing.
There was no room for thought. No room to think about my dad and his replacement family. No room to think about my life in the city, which was starting to look weirdly bland compared to life in the strange town of Blackwell Hollow. There was no room to feel bad about the fact that I hadn’t stayed in touch with Aunt Evelyn or about the complexity of selling the house and bakery.
There wasn’t even room to think about Beck and Noah.
There was just Dane’s big hands sliding into my hair and the press of his muscular body against mine, so demanding I was bowed back over the wood table in the courtroom.
I slid my arms up the granite wall of his chest and wrapped them around his neck, then pressed myself tightly against him, opening my lips in answer to the demands of his tongue.
I gasped into his mouth as his dick hit my stomach, close enough to my now-throbbing pussy that a yawn of raw lust opened up at my center, tempting me to strip off my shorts, unzip his pants, guide him inside me right then and there even though a few hours earlier I would have said he was a huge pain in my ass.
The room spun as he pillaged my mouth, taking everything I had to give and demanding even more. His tongue was a firebrand leaving sparks in its wake, lighting me up like the night sky on the Fourth of July.