Beguiling (Tempting #2) (17 page)

She nodded with a shy smile, then leaned forward to grab her shirt from where I’d tossed it. The moment had passed as soon as she moved away from me, but I wanted to follow the line of her spine with my fingers before she covered it up with the white cotton.

Then she stood, smoothing her shirt down after she covered herself again.

“Do you want me to like, order a pizza or something?”

“My payment for a job well done?”

“No,” she shot back. “I did all the work, right?”

I laughed. “I suppose you did.”

She smiled at me. “So? Pizza and we can finish the movie?”

There was no ulterior motive hidden in her eyes, nothing else we needed to accomplish, with the exception of me needing to go into the bathroom and alleviate the blue ball situation currently prohibiting me from standing up. And she was the one asking me to stay. Maybe it was pathetic, that this little scrap from her felt like a feast to me. Then I guess I was pathetic.

“Sure. Sounds good.”

The answering smile she gave me told me she just might feel the same way.

I
was legitimately starting
to think that I was losing my mind. Actually, Scarlet was making me lose my mind. There had been a couple girls before, where I’d convinced myself that I was feeling something serious for them, but in retrospect those relationships could barely even be classified as lust.

Convenient was one word. And when they either turned out to be crazy or attached, then convenient didn’t even work. But not once, with any of the girls that I’d dated or hung out with or even spent an evening flirting with, had I felt such an overwhelming and exhausting sense of infatuation.

Not like this.

On the days where Scarlet and I slipped back into our routine of driver and passenger, like we were starting to do for a few days after we crossed some physical line again, I dissected her eye contact, whether she watched my mouth or if she played with her hair while I looked at her. When she started telling me about things that happened in class or the rescue she volunteered at, I couldn’t stop staring at her lips when she talked, or the way she flipped her hands around to prove a point, or the way her eyes brightened up when she told me about an animal at the rescue.

And she was smart. Scarlet was so fucking smart that it probably should have intimidated me. But it didn’t. Not like it used to.

Probably because she didn’t lord it over me, or dumb down the things she talked about. Occasionally, I pulled up my dictionary app, like if I wasn’t sure what supercilious meant, especially not when she was talking about one of her profs. Suffice it to say, I now know that Scarlet used to give me supercilious looks
all the time
.

That’s probably what scared me more than anything, that most of the things I couldn’t stop noticing? They weren’t physical. In fact, the non-physical stuff was starting to affect me just as much as when she leaned over and I could see down her shirt, or if she licked her bottom lip. Her laugh was enough to make me want to bury my head under her skirt now.

It was so fucked up. Wasn’t it?

Or was this what was supposed to happen when you met someone who was available and smart and pretty and kind and mentally stable?

“Earth to Leo,” Scarlet called, waving a hand in front of my face.

“Yeah, sorry.” I gave her an apologetic smile, my eyes sliding over her face and neck. She was wearing a little bit more makeup today, even more than she’d had on this morning on our drive in. Like she’d freshened up before she picked me up.

“It’s okay. It’s not like you have to talk to me. You just blanked out right in the middle of a sentence. You were telling me about the new center that’s going to be on your team in the fall.”

Oh yeah. Holy shit, see? I was losing it. And Scarlet just sat there, looking at me with those big eyes and sweet smile, with no fucking clue that I was over here obsessing about the fact that her lips looked pinker and softer than they had this morning, and her lashes were darker and longer. Or that she’d curled the ends of her hair. I opened my mouth, to … I don’t even know what I was going to say, but I had to tell her
something
of what was going on in my head.

Then her phone rang. Her eyes lit up when she saw the screen. “Hey, Mom,” she said into the phone after she picked it up. “Oh, I’m just driving home.”

She glanced over at me with a wry smile. It was fucking adorable and it made me want to stab my eyes out because I was thinking about how adorable her smile was.

“Yeah, Leo is here.” She rolled her eyes. “My mom says hi.”

“Hi, Mrs. Jennings,” I said back.

Scarlet hummed in answer to something her mom said, then gave me another quick look. “Yeah, I could do that. What do you need me to do with it once I get it?” She glanced in the rearview mirror and then flipped on her blinker to take the next exit, which was about ten minutes before we would normally get off the highway. “Sure, no problem. I’ll do that as soon as I get home. Yeah. Mmmhmm. Oh, probably another fifteen minutes? Is that okay? All right, bye.” Scarlet tucked her phone underneath her leg and took a right, toward her dad’s church, the white steeple of which I could see down another block or two. “I have to grab some paper that my dad left on his desk really quick. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine. Doesn’t he have a secretary that can send it to him?”

She rolled her eyes at me, but it was tempered by her smile. “Administrative assistant, you mean? And yes, he does have one, but she’s off this week and if someone’s going to go through his stuff, I guess he’d rather have it be me.”

There were only a couple other cars in the church parking lot when Scarlet pulled in. Instead of pulling the car underneath the large white overhang that covered the main entrance to the church, she drove off to the side of the building and parked in an empty spot.

“Is the main entrance locked or something?”

She nodded while she sifted through her purse. “Yeah, during the week, people can only come through this entrance near all the offices. Do you mind waiting in the car?”

“You afraid to bring me into a holy place, Scarlet?” I teased.

While she laughed, she opened her car door. “It’s not about being afraid, Leo. I just don’t think you could physically walk through those doors without being struck by lightning.”

I grinned when she slammed her door shut and walked toward the entrance. The wind obviously picked up, because her hair swept off to the side of her head, like a bright, copper colored flag against the white backdrop of the church building.

Right before she disappeared through the door, she turned and looked toward the car, pointing a finger in my direction, as if to remind me that I was supposed to wait.

Clearly, Scarlet didn’t understand the power of reverse psychology to a man like me. After I shut the car door, I jogged to the back entrance of the church, praying that it hadn’t locked behind Scarlet. It opened silently, and the dark hallway of the church was just as quiet. No one sat at the reception desk, and muted voices came from the direction of the sanctuary.

I hadn’t been in this church in years, my parents long past the point where they made me go with them on the weekends or school breaks when I was home, but I did remember where the pastor’s office was.

The heavy oak door to Pastor Jennings’ office was halfway open, and when I peeked in, Scarlet was bent over the large, imposing desk, rifling through a stack of papers. She hadn’t turned on any lights, and since the blinds over the massive window were shut, the room was surprisingly dark, considering the bright sunshine outside.

I pushed the door open just enough that I could walk through, and her head shot up.

“Leo, you’re supposed to wait in the car.” When I shut the door with a soft click behind me, she immediately started shaking her head. “No way. You stay right there, mister.”

“No way, what? I just came in to see if I could prove you wrong. No lightning to be found.”

She laughed, then looked back down at the papers. When she found the one she was looking for, she placed the rest of the papers back in the top drawer. I stayed right in front of the door, just like she asked, except when she approached me, I didn’t move.

“Leo, quit screwing around.” The words would have made me get out of the way, but her voice wasn’t annoyed in the slightest. Her eyes were bright, and the way she said them, all breathy and low, kept me exactly where I was.

“Who, me? I’m not.” When she got close enough, I smoothed my hands around her hips, the soft material of her black leggings thin enough that I could feel the heat from her skin.

“You’re
always
playing, Leo.”

I turned, so her back was up against the door now, and I pressed against her with my hips, letting her feel how very serious I was. She dropped her head back against the wood with a soft moan, and I kissed the spot of skin underneath her ear. “No playing, Scarlet. I promise.”

Not anymore. I haven’t been playing with you, not even the first night
, I wanted to say. But I kissed her instead, sweeping my tongue into her mouth. Because I wasn’t sure she’d believe me. And if she couldn’t trust that my feelings were getting bigger and bigger every single day I spent time with her, then I didn’t dare let them out.

Scarlet wrapped her arms around my neck and threw herself into my kiss. I threw myself right back at her, gripping her harder and tighter until I knew she’d have light bruises in the shapes of my fingers along the curve of her ass.

I felt sloppy, kissing her with tongue and teeth, but the breathy whimpers that she fed me meant that she didn’t care.

“Does this constitute a public place?” I whispered in between kisses, at the same time that I slid a hand inside the front of her leggings.

“Not here, Leo,” she moaned, rocking her hips into my hand while I rubbed at her clit through her soaked underwear. “We cannot do this here.”

“Damn it, Scarlet, feel how wet you are.” I hooked a finger on her underwear and pulled it to the side, immediately sinking two fingers inside of her. Her knees buckled and I wrapped my other arm around her waist, anchoring her to me. “I can’t stop thinking about this, thinking about you.”

It was the closest I could get to the truth, without saying it as baldly as I was feeling it. I was obsessed with her. I’d never had a woman take up this much of my headspace. Never.

She answered me with frenzied kisses, sucking at my lips and my tongue, gripping the back of my head with curved fingers.

Then we heard voices pass the door. We both froze, eyes wide open and locked on each other. Some women may have been able to continue, if I’d pushed. But I wouldn’t do that to her, not Scarlet. If I embarrassed her in this place, she’d
never
forgive me. And that was the thing when you realized that you didn’t just
like
someone, that you respect them. I couldn’t fathom doing something to lose that respect. Very carefully, I pulled my fingers out of her, making sure to put her underwear back in place. Then I leaned forward to rest my forehead against hers.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

“It’s okay,” she mouthed back, and from the look in her eye, she meant it.

The voices had stopped closely enough that neither of us dared to move. Then they faded, and the sound of an office door closing made us both sag in relief.

On the drive home, we laughed again, Scarlet admitting that she got the same feeling once we’d made it safely back to her car that she did the day she stole from The Corner Store. I just smiled, admiring the bright excitement on her face when she said it.

Scarlet got out of the car first, still talking about something from her class earlier, and she never looked behind her to check whether I was following, she just assumed.

I fucking loved that.

It made something swell and expand inside of me, something warm and soothing and fucking terrifying. Like if I didn’t
do
something,
say
something to her, to let her know that this was more to me, more than I’d ever anticipated, I would explode.

As soon as she shrugged her messenger bag onto the floor of the kitchen, I gripped her hips, turning her around to face me. I dove my hands into her hair, gripping the strands before I kissed her. Her hands immediately went up under my shirt, smoothing along the muscles in my back.

In the back of my mind, I knew I should probably have said something, taken the moment to admit how terrified I was of this, of her, and what she could do to me. But she was right there with me, gripping and clutching at me in the exact same way that I was, with greedy hands and selfish tongues, loud moans that echoed in the room around us.

I pulled back long enough to boost her up on the island. Scarlet cocked her head in a question, but didn’t protest when I laid a hand on her chest and pushed her until she laid back on the granite.

“Lift,” I said in one gruff syllable after tugging at the waistband of her leggings with rough hands. She did, meeting my gaze with eyes so liquid and dark that I wasn’t positive she wouldn’t drown me eventually.

I peeled her leggings and her underwear off in one long slide, then hooked my hands behind her knees and pulled her to the edge of the counter. She shivered, probably from the cold stone underneath her, so I lifted her legs, propping one and then the other over my shoulders, framing my face between her thighs.

Inches before my tongue made contact, her phone started ringing in her purse.

“Damn it,” she groaned. Or maybe that was me. No, I was licking the inside of her thigh, so it was Scarlet. “That’s probably my … ahhhh, oh holy shit that feels good, that’s probably my mom wondering if I got the paper.”

I blew on the seam of her pussy and she clamped her thighs around my head. “Can you call them later?”

“I…” she stammered, the sound sliding out into a long moan when I swiped my tongue up her outer lips. “Yeah, yes, I can call them back.”

“Good girl.” I sucked her clit into my mouth, flicking at it with my tongue, her taste flooding my mouth.

“What part of the list is this?” she panted, tensing when I clutched at her thigh with hard fingers.

I pulled back so I could see her face. “Maybe I’m working on my own list now. Is that okay?”

The only thing she said for the next ten minutes was
yes
. Over and over and over.