It's Complicated (20 page)

The walk over here had been filled with questions about what exactly was going on between them. But as he bent down to take her mouth fully, and her fingers played with the curly edges of his hair as she slid against him, her body submitting to his, letting him use his lips and tongue and hands to re-introduce himself, what was between them most urgently was his rock-hard—

“Hi!” she gasped, coming up for air, touching foreheads. Grinning, her lips stretched in a feline smile, the kind a woman gives you right after a toe-curling session in bed.

Not
before
.

The night just got way more interesting. His hands held her hips against his thighs, and he assumed she could feel him, he wanted her to feel him, bending his knees enough to lean down and go for more of that luscious mouth. Maybe an appetizer in bed before dinner. And then dinner in bed. Then bed after dinner.

With a nightcap of sex on the baseball field across the street.

Shivers ran through her body as he held her, as if she could read his mind.

And then she did.

Pulling him by the hand to the kitchen counter, she offered him the bottle of wine to hold, then reached into a drawer for a bottle opener.

“Dinner doesn’t have to be ready for a while. Let’s enjoy a glass or three of wine.” The sly smile tickled her lips and he found himself falling into her eyes, his body harder and needier than he’d been for any woman before. A light jazz sound tinkled through the air, his ears following the sound down the hallway. Her bedroom? What color was her bedspread? Her pillow? Her vibrator?

She had to have one. No one this sensual, this experimental, wouldn’t.

Hell, she probably had devices he’d never heard of.

And then he realized she was eyeing him warily. Too much silence, he suspected. Time to pay attention to the actual woman in front of him and stop ruminating on her battery-operated bedfellows.

“A glass of wine would be lovely,” he said, taking the corkscrew from her. The sentence a bit too formal, too cultured. He sounded like his grandfather.

“You live alone?” he asked, impressed. He knew what he paid in rent at his apartment, a two-bedroom he split with a roommate who was currently on the first week of six out of town on a fellowship. The solitude was refreshing. If she could afford to shoulder this place on her own, she was either an extreme introvert—which didn’t make sense, given her personality—or she was doing well financially.

He suspected neither was quite right, though. Josie was complex. Complicated. Layered. Whatever her answer, he knew it wouldn’t reveal all. He’d have to keep asking.

That was fine.

He would make the time.

“Yes,” she said. “This is only a one-bedroom with a little den, and the owner lives on the third floor. He says he likes having a nurse as a tenant, and I’ve been here for years.” He opened the wine, the pressure of the bottle against his crotch a bit unsettling as he used brute force to uncork it, narrowly missing a horrific groin splash.

Josie pulled two long-stemmed wine glasses from a noticeably minimalist cupboard. Two wine glasses. Two mugs. Two of everything but plates and bowls, and if his eyes cataloged it correctly, there were four each of those, all matching, all neatly stacked.

“I can’t imagine living alone. I’ve been doing the roommate thing for so long,” he ventured. Through new eyes he surveyed the kitchen. Nothing spare in there. She lived a sparse though comfortable life, the incongruity quite charming. Unlike his own rumpled, slightly disheveled place, where no one really paid attention to anything but eating, sleeping, and showering, she seemed to have put a lot of thought into her environment.

And, especially, into what she
didn’t
put in it.

“I love it,” she answered, shrugging. In unison, they both took sips of the wine. Spending more than his usual $3 for wine at Trader Joe’s, Alex had asked the clerk to surprise him. The surprise was that the wine was delicious, thank goodness.

“Mmmm,” she said through a sip. “Good wine.”

“Good company,” he answered, offering his glass for a toast. Something snapped inside, a sense of longing and crushing desire that made him want her even more. He wanted to spend days in her bed, ordering takeout Thai and answering the door in a towel, moving the coffeemaker to her bedside table so they could be sustained by caffeine and spicy peanut sauce. Licked off her navel.

Ahh.

No. No, Alex. No!
He couldn’t keep doing this—it really wasn’t just about sex, even if the hollow in her throat as she lifted the glass to take a big swig made him nearly groan with the need to savor it with his tongue.

Hold back, buddy. You’ll scare her off if you make it all about sex.

Their eyes locked and he saw something in her, a deeper calm that helped to ground him. For a woman who was so focused on movement and wit, she was remarkably subdued in her own home, casual and centered.

And she had let him in.

Oh my God, can he tell how nervous and fucked up I really am?
Josie wondered as their wine glasses connected, her hand frozen in space as she tried not to shatter. Not the glass—herself.

On the outside, she worked very hard to be casual and free, but on the inside all she wanted was to pile into bed with him and be fucked mindless.

No!
Sex couldn’t be the focus here. Dinner was. Food, wine, talk, and just being together. The kiss they’d shared was a way to say “hello,” not necessarily a preliminary to hot monkey sex. Whether they ended up in bed or not didn’t matter.

Ah, hell. She could hear the snort in her head. Fooling herself was getting harder and harder.

And judging by what she could see of Alex’s package, so was he.

Good thing she hadn’t boiled the pasta yet. A part of her wanted tonight to be about getting to know each other, talking late into the night, curled up and cuddling in the living room. Or enjoying a nice summer stroll.

But…no.

Hot monkey sex it was.

His eyes raked over her body like a man determined, with a look of fire that licked at the edges of her skin, his heat unmistakable and impossible to avoid (not that she wanted to).

How could this feel so right, even through her nervousness? In the morning, she expected to see him in the kitchen at the table, shirtless and tousled, enjoying coffee with her and then, of course, enjoying
her
for breakfast. The coffee was merely a vehicle for extra energy and a second (third, fourth, fifth) wind. Plus the idea of a shirtless Alex relaxing in a sunbeam in her kitchen made her drool.

Drool was
good
.

Why try to fight it? She squared her shoulders unconsciously with the decision to go forth, and was keenly aware that the gesture pushed her breasts forward. Shifting to relax a bit only succeeded in loosening her hips, and the thought flashed through her mind of her legs wrapped around
his
hips. A flood of heat pooled between her legs and she sighed. The form-fitting cotton pants she’d chosen so carefully for the way they made her ass look now plagued her as she shifted slightly, clit warming up and raring to go.

He took her sigh as an invitation to step closer.

Excellent.

What he had chosen to wear intrigued her, turning up the fire inside yet another level. A button-down oxford, somewhere between turquoise and light blue, with the top two buttons undone. A sprinkling of dark chest hair peeked out from the V at his throat. His leather belt was so distressed it might very well have been made from a dead cow dragged twenty miles through Arizona desert, but he’d looped it through very simple dark blue pants. His dark eyes watched her watching him.

The air between them held the scent of wine and a hungry tension. Neither seemed able to put anything to words, but gestures and expressions were also inadequate. The longer they stared, the more the energy seemed poised to crackle into actual sparks; even her fat cat, languidly sauntering past them, seemed to notice it, glancing their way and dashing inexplicably in a new direction. Cars rumbled past outside, and a sudden burst of field lights from across the street told her the Little League game was in session. Their glow added a surreal shine to Alex’s eyes, fixed on hers as he finished the rest of his wine in one long gulp.

Copying him, she gulped the rest of her glass and held out the bottle, tipping the neck as if to say,
More?
He nodded, and her hand rotated slowly, his eyes burning into her as she poured his second glass. She flickered her gaze away only enough to ensure she didn’t spill the wine, but missed only a blink or two of Möbius strip of reciprocal observation.

And then he asked, “Is Josie short for Josephine?”

Another preliminary to get out of the way. Names. “Yes. Josephine Elizabeth Mendham.”

His smile lit up the room. And her heart. He bowed slightly, a joking move, and said, “Alexander Edward Derjian. At your service.”

That name rang a bell, but before she could think twice, he closed the space between them and slipped an arm around her waist, his free hand first setting down his wine glass and then carefully prying hers from her own hand. His fingers so gentle and facile on the stem that she swooned. Surgeon’s hands. Long fingers. Oh, what could those do to parts of her that cried out for heat and touch and more?

She was about to find out.

“Alex, I—” His fingers, achingly soft, landed on her lips, silencing her, and the arm around her waist tightened, the hand splayed against the middle of her back where her shoulder blades met.

“Let me speak first, Ms. Josephine Elizabeth Mendham.” The roll of her full name off his tongue sent her knees into a weak state, thighs humming, and her breathing becoming a bit labored with lust. The very air between them felt changed, now thick with a new element, one of luscious, unqualified want.

His hair slid over his forehead, the brown waves out of place yet damn near perfect. His wide cheekbones and bright eyes competed for her attention with his fingers, which now played with her lower lip. Two fingers rolling out a peek of the wetness of her mouth as his touch trailed to her chin.

“I said the other day that this isn’t just about sex,” he continued.

“I know—” Now he pressed his middle three fingers against her mouth, harder. She moaned involuntarily, her hard swallow and slow, long inhale the only way to hold back from coming right there in his arms in full view of the damn cat, who had now decided to come back and study them like intriguing prey.

“I know you think you know.” Alex pivoted and grabbed a kitchen chair with the hand that wasn’t making love to her mouth, sitting down and pulling her into his lap. The push of his hardness under her ass made her center swell, her throat tighten with need, and her mouth seek his.

A smile tickled his lips as he stroked her hip, running one wide palm down her thigh. This was a man who enjoyed touching women, sending a thrill of damn near everything through her, as if what she had thought was an isolated, insular act—making love—was instead a blanket that covered her entire world. Instead of separating and compartmentalizing—
This is sex time. This is lunch time. This is work time.
—he made it seem, in this split second, that it could all be integrated into
This is life.

“I need to make
sure
you know, Josie. This is me telling you so. But first, I want to make love with you, because no matter how many times I tell myself this isn’t only about sex, and that I don’t want to scare you off by making you think I think it’s only about sex, all I can think about is getting you stripped bare and using my hands and tongue and”—he shifted, making it obvious which other part of his body he wished to use—“to make you cry out my name like it’s the only word left in your mind.”

Josie had no words. She couldn’t even try to speak.

“And then we’ll work on the rest of the getting to know each other stuff, like your cat’s name, and—”

Sweetly, with an exquisite motion that took time and broke it into little slivers of awareness, she rose up in his lap, wrapping her legs about his waist on the chair, the rasp of cloth against cloth a friction that set her entire body abuzz. With one finger, she traced a lazy path from his eyebrow down his face, the aroma of his cologne infusing her as she let all her senses come forth and accept this as it blossomed, time changing in the air between them. The look of her skin against his, how his eyebrow raised with a questioning look, how his eyes told her more in an unspoken language than every word she’d heard in her lifetime could possibly have communicated.

The brush of her fingertips against his freshly shaven chin and the taste of his jawline as she leaned down to kiss it mingled with the sounds of kids and parents cheering across the street, blending with blues that poured out of the speakers in her bedroom. What had felt like a nervous rush since the second she’d met him in the hospital last week turned on a dime. His strong, smooth hands now caressing the nape of her neck, his abs brushing against hers, their bodies seeking to fit into each other just right as their tongues found each other, a savored entwining that she deliberately drew out, as if to tell him in tender flesh that this
now
was not measured in seconds or minutes or hours.