She paused.
He rose slowly to his feet.
She turned her back to him.
His heart skipped.No, don’t go, please... even if I’m hallucinating from all the water inhalation...
But it was only so she could pull the door closed.
He took another step forward.
She turned the lock on his door.
His heart literally forgot to beat.
And then she turned around to face him again, leaned against the door as if by pressing her back against it, none of her doubts or the demands on their time could possibly get in.
“You said I knew where to find you if I wanted you.”
He took another step.
Then another.
He was midstep when suddenly everything went black.
“What the—”
He misjudged his next step, drove his thigh into the corner of his desk, dodged backward hissing and swearing, collided with his guest chair and landed hard on the seat, whereupon it promptly went gliding gently across the pitch-black room as if he’d just boarded the teacup ride at Disneyland.
Eden yelped as he crashed into her. He grunted as his face was instantly filled with her silky hair and her knee just barely missed his groin and her hands flew off in the darkness beyond his shoulder.
He caught her before they both toppled. With some deft maneuvering, the two of them got her turned around and her limbs all going the right way, so that he was cradling her after the fashion of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
And ashewasn’t a dummy, he wrapped his arms around her.
And held on.
He could feel her breathing—the rapid rise and fall—beneath his arms. She smelled like flowers and coconut. Still.
A silence, rather stunned in quality, ensued.
“I must have leaned against the light switch,” she offered on a whisper, finally.
He didn’t laugh. He didn’t yet want to besmirch the glory of holding this woman with unnecessary conversation. Fate was on his side: he’d only gotten to her faster in a rolling chair.
“So thoughtful of you to pick me up at the door,” she whispered.
He found his voice. “Yeah, well, I’m a gentleman... at first. That’s how I hook you. And then I do things like this...”
He touched his tongue to her lips, coaxing them open. And what ensued was so scorching, so slow and claiming and carnal, that by rights the metal girders holding up the school ought to have melted.
Everything else on him was hard as a girder.
Falling or flying? He couldn’t tell in the middle of that kiss. Both.
He lifted his lips from hers. Just a very little. He could still feel her breath against them.
But he could feel her body swaying as her breath came faster.