The Best Part of Me (16 page)

He took her mouth again and kissed her hard. His hips rocked harder as their bodies crashed together. She ran her hands down his spine to his butt, where she pressed him closer to her.

“Ewan, I can't….” Her voice trailed off, and he knew she was about to climax as he felt her body begin to tremble beneath him.

He ran his hand down her thigh and under her hip and pulled her to meet his thrusts. He heard her breath quicken and watched as her mouth opened in a breathless moan. Her body began to spasm, and as she closed around his cock like a vice, he finally allowed himself to let go. With a final push, he threw back his head with a curse. His dick kicked inside of her as he spilled himself. The wave of heat washed through him as his tense body strained in release.

When his head finally cleared, he opened his eyes to find Quinn looking up at him with sleepy eyes. In the span of twenty-four hours, he'd had the two best orgasms he'd ever had. The first one he'd chalked up to his lack of sex in the past couple months. But he didn't have an excuse for this one. This one had been more mind-blowing than the first. And the scary part was that his body was still humming and wanting more.

Even if he wanted to—which he didn't—he wouldn't be able to name the last woman he'd been with. All he could think about was the woman underneath him, whose panting breath he could still feel against his neck. With his mind still spinning like a carousel, he couldn't draw any explanations.

Why hadn't it ever felt like this before? Where did all her passion come from?

Jealousy burned at the thought of her with other guys. There was no way that things would have broken off between her and her old lovers if the sex had been this good. The bastards must have been shit in bed. Thank you, Jesus.

“Please tell me you're not going to make me move right now,” she sighed.

Ewan grinned and slowly lifted his body, freeing her petite frame. Her pink skin glistened with perspiration.

She was beautiful, lying there half-naked on his couch.

Quinn had a long, graceful neck above her smooth shoulders. He could see the definition of her muscles as he ran his eyes down her arms. He wasn't surprised with the amount of yard work she did. Her strength was sexy as hell. Her breasts were hidden underneath her white bra. Her smooth, flat stomach narrowed into her lean waist. He followed the faint lines of her abdomen to the light brown curls at the apex of her thighs. Her shapely hips gave way to fit, lean legs.

Goddamn. He was getting hard, and he wanted to take her again. He felt like he needed to mark her so that others would know she was his.

His.

Jesus. What the fuck was that about? Before he allowed himself to dwell on what part of her was his and why that scared the shit out of him, he got up, zipped his pants, and walked into the kitchen to get some water. He heard clothes rustling and, after a few moments, heard her soft footsteps stop at the entrance of the kitchen.

“How old are you?” he heard her ask from the doorway.

“Thirty-two.”

He filled two glasses with water and handed one to her. She smiled at him before taking a sip. He sat down at the small rectangular table near the window, and she slid into the chair opposite him.

“How long have you lived here?” she said, looking around his apartment.

“This apartment? About six years. But I've been in Ballagh since I was nine years old.”

“Do you have family here other than your uncle's family?”

He shook his head. He knew she meant his parents, but that was definitely a discussion he didn't want to have. “How about you? Were you born in Pittsburgh?”

“Born and raised. Aunt Maura is my mother's sister. She and Rory are the only relatives I have in the U.S. My father was from Germany, and all of his family still live there. I've met them a few times, but I'm not that close to them.”

“How long do you plan to stay in Ballagh?”

“Just through the summer.”

Silence hung between them. Ewan knew that he only had four more months to get his fill of her before she left. And he was going to enjoy every minute of it.

“Where's your bathroom?”

He nodded toward his bedroom. “Through there.”

She stood and left the room, his eyes appreciating the way her jeans hugged her ass. He heard her turn on the faucet in the other room. After a few minutes, she reappeared and sat back down, her face washed and her hair pulled up in an elastic band. She looked cute with her cheeks flushed. She had those little wrinkle lines between her eyebrows again and was thinking hard about something.

“Something wrong?”

She looked up at him, realized he was watching her, and smiled. “Are you…” She paused. “Are you sleeping with anyone else?”

He heard the hesitation in her voice as she asked.

“I told you I haven't been with anyone for over a month,” he replied.

She frowned and stared at her water glass. “I guess I didn't ask the right question. What I should have said was are you planning to sleep with anyone else?”

He frowned, not understanding her meaning. “Not at the moment.”

Ewan watched her face as she started to say something but then stopped. Whatever it was that rolled around in her head had her tongue-tied. She took another breath and tried again. “I'm sure it's no big surprise, but I'm not sleeping with anyone else. And I don't want to,” she said. “And I'd hope you wouldn't want to either.”

When he didn't immediately respond, she began to shift in her seat.

“I'm not asking for a relationship or anything, but I don't think I can sleep with you if you're sleeping with other women.” She stopped and tilted her chin up. “It's…it's just how I feel.”

He didn't have any plans to be with anyone else at the moment. He couldn't imagine anything else feeling as good as it did when he was with her. He couldn't quite put his finger on why that was. She was nervous, and he wanted to reassure her, but he had to be careful to say the right thing. He couldn't promise her anything long term.

She gave him a timid smile. “It's kind of a deal breaker.”

“I'm guessing that you've been burned before?”

She nodded. The look on her face, a mix of pain and embarrassment, bothered him. He didn't ask for an explanation, and he almost wished that she wouldn't talk about it, so that she wouldn't have to sift through whatever was causing her to look so unhappy.

“I had this boyfriend in undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh; his name was Ben. He seemed like a nice guy. I'd met him in my chemistry lab during sophomore year, and we'd hit it off. He asked me out to dinner a few times before we officially started seeing each other. He took me to his fraternity formal, bought me flowers…you know, all those things that boyfriends do.”

Ewan didn't know all those things that boyfriends did since he'd never been a boyfriend before. Even though she was skimming through her story as if it were insignificant, he sensed her sadness. Whatever this asshole did had hurt her.

“He tried to get me to sleep with him, several times, in fact. But I'd resisted. I'm not sure why I did, but I just wasn't ready yet. I hadn't consciously thought that Ben wasn't the right one. I just hadn't had that ah-ha moment where I'd known it was the right time to lose my virginity.”

Ewan nodded but cringed inside, knowing exactly where this story was going to end up.

“I'll spare you the details, but one night, things went a little further than before. He took it as a sign that I was finally ready. And I thought I would be able to, but at the last minute, I stopped him. I just couldn't go through with it,” she said. “He was mad. He called me some very unflattering things. He said I was a tease.”

Ewan had known guys like this Ben. Guys who would do just about anything to get under a woman's skirt, try to make them feel guilty for leading them on. They were pathetic, and it made him sick that someone had treated her this way.

“I was hurt, so I ended it. Afterwards, I avoided him and was successful for about three days until he tracked me down coming out of one of my classes.”

Ewan watched as she frowned, knowing that she'd reached the part of the story where she started to blame herself.

“He apologized profusely. Said he got caught up in the moment. That he felt miserable without me. I was going to brush him off, but then he told me he loved me,” she said. “No one had ever said that to me before. I didn't even know how I felt about it at that moment, but in some weird way, it felt nice. I agreed to go to dinner with him, and things went back to the way they were before. And then one night I slept with him.”

She looked up at Ewan. And although she was trying her hardest to keep emotion off her face, he could see the hurt in her eyes.

“Anyways, we continued to see each other for a few months, and I thought everything was fine. One night I dropped by his room to pick something up, and I found him sitting on his couch. There was a girl kneeling in front of him giving him a blow job.” Quinn sat silently for a moment as she watched the water swirl in her glass. “I wish he would have acted surprised to see me. Tried to apologize. To say something really lame like, ‘It's not what it looks like.' But as I stood there, with my feet nailed to the floor, the girl barely looked at me for two seconds before Ben gently guided her head back between his legs. And he just looked at me with his head resting on the back of the couch, daring me to say something. I should have thrown something at him or cussed him out. But all I could think to say was, ‘You need to learn to lock your door.' And then I left.”

Ewan realized he was squeezing his glass so tight that it was in danger of shattering.

She laughed then, still looking at her water, and shook her head. “He had been sleeping with other women the entire time he was with me. I'd thought it meant something special, but it didn't. Even if I would have had the whole exclusivity talk with him back then, he would have lied about it, I'm sure,” she said. And then Quinn looked up at him, her clear gray eyes like mirrors. “But I don't think you're the type of guy who would lie.”

Her words pulled the air straight from his lungs. She didn't know him. This absolute faith was something he wasn't familiar with, and he wasn't sure it was something he wanted. But it moved him. More than he would have believed.

He put his glass on the table and slowly slid his chair back. He walked to her, took the glass from her hand, and pulled her out of her seat.

“I won't lie to you.” He caught a stray strand of hair and curled it behind her ear. He wanted to say more. To tell her she was safe with him. To tell her that he would make her happy. That he would never break her heart like Ben had. But those were promises that he didn't know he could keep.

Ewan nudged her chin up with his index finger and looked into her eyes. He decided to stick with what he knew he could promise.

“I won't sleep with anyone else while we're together. It'll just be you.”

It must have been enough, because she smiled.

“I believe you,” she whispered.

She rose up on her toes and placed a kiss to his mouth. As short as the kiss was, he felt the softness of her lips against his. He looked down at her and felt her warm fingers fan out against his pecs, and he watched as her pink tongue slowly licked along her bottom lip. That simple action made desire start to pool in his groin as he thought of over a hundred places he wanted her to put that tongue.

She gently cleared her throat. “It's late. I probably should be going.”

Oh, but we're just getting started.

“Why?” he asked, leaning in to nip at her earlobe.

She took a deep breath. “My aunt's probably fallen asleep in her recliner, waiting for me to sneak back into the house.”

“Let her sleep then.” He'd found a sensitive spot on the front of her throat that she liked.

“No, really,” she whispered. He moved his mouth up the other side of her neck and placed his lips against the soft spot behind her ear. “Plus, I don't want you to think I'm easy.”

“But I like easy."

He felt her laugh and pulled back to look into her eyes. “Will you walk me home?”

Reluctantly, he agreed, even though his dick started throwing a temper tantrum. He was close to begging her to stay, but he'd never begged a woman for anything before, and he wasn't going to start now. But the phrase “everything in moderation, nothing in excess” was meaningless when it came to Quinn.

As they walked toward her aunt's house in silence, she tucked her arm through his and held on to him like he was an anchor. So much for trying to stay away from her. No way was that possible. Not now.

He could do temporary. That was the only reason he'd agreed not to sleep with anyone else while they were together. And he wasn't going to think too much about his decision because it really wasn't that big of a deal. It wouldn't be hard not to fuck other women when he had pretty much everything he needed in the woman hanging on his arm at the moment. It was a win-win situation.

He couldn't help but think that good things like this just didn't happen to people like him.

Quinn smiled at Ewan who waited patiently as she hurried around the kitchen putting the last of her lunch away.

“Are you sure you don't mind taking me to the garden center?” she asked as she closed the refrigerator door. Ewan shook his head.

He'd arrived just as she was eating the last half of a turkey sandwich, and she'd waved him in from the kitchen table. He had lingered just inside the door, almost as if there was some invisible line on the ground that he couldn't cross. Once she'd told him that Aunt Maura wasn't in the house, he'd visibly relaxed and walked over to where she was sitting.

His white T-shirt had seen better days and was almost thin enough to see through, and his black pants had wear marks around the knees. She was beginning to think that there was nothing he could wear that didn't make him look gorgeous.