Hartley didn’t say anything more. He simply limped in as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world to walk into my room when he was supposed to be having I-missed-you-so-much sex with Stacia. He slipped the bottle into my corner of the sofa. Then he crutched around the coffee table to the other end. He bent over me, lifting first one of my legs and then the other, then slid in underneath me, my legs in his lap. He hiked his broken leg onto the table and reached all the way over my body for the bottle.
As I watched the Man in Black charge off in search of his princess, Hartley began twisting the wire holder off the bottle of champagne. A moment later I heard the satisfying pop of a cork expertly ejected, and then the glug and fizz as he poured it into glasses.
“Callahan,” he said, his voice a masculine rumble. I sat up to accept a glass, shoving my legs onto the coffee table beside his. “Stash this?” he said, handing me the bottle. Without comment, I bent down to find a place for it on the floor.
When I leaned back again, my shoulders collided with his arm, which was draped behind me on the sofa. The arm didn’t move. So, gingerly, I rested against it. Hartley gave an enormous sigh, the sound of defeat and frustration. “Cheers, Callahan,” he said.
We touched glasses, and some instinct made me avoid his eyes. I wasn’t about to grill him on his sudden change of fortune. He was supposed to be getting sweaty with his gorgeous girlfriend, and now here he was, sitting in front of another movie with me.
But this is so snuggly! my hope fairy cried, clapping her tiny hands with glee.
I took a sip of my bubbly. “Wow,” I blurted out. It was smooth and tangy and delicious. If expensive had a taste, this was it.
“Smooth, right?” his voice sounded tired.
“It’s amazing Hartley. But maybe you find it…bitter?” I looked him in the eye for the first time then, giving him a wink.
He rolled his eyes. “The wine is good, Callahan. It is empirically good. In my family we’d call it first-rate hooch. In Stacia’s family, there’s an entire dictionary of words for it. You should hear her father go on about wine.” Hartley snorted.
“Sounds riveting.” But then I felt guilty, since I’d never met them in my life. “If nothing else, she has very good taste.” But that was a fraught comment too, because it revealed too much of how I felt about Hartley. “Sorry she was a no-show.”
He shook his head with obvious disgust. “She’ll turn up tomorrow, full of apologies. She always does.” He took another sip and turned toward the movie. Together, we watched Wesley rolling down the hill, yelling “AS…YOU…WISH!” up to Buttercup.
God, it was the perfect moment in a perfect film. Hope fairies everywhere probably sipped from that scene like nectar. Leaning back against Hartley’s warm body, I sipped my champagne rather more quickly than I meant to. But it was so good I couldn’t help myself.
“Time for a refill?” he asked after awhile.
I bent down for the bottle, and then refilled both our glasses, emptying the bottle. “Happy birthday,” I said then. “I don’t think I said it before.”
He clinked his glass into mine. “Thank you, Callahan.”
“I got you a present,” I told him. “Is it terrible that I’m too lazy to get up and get it right now?”
In answer, he pulled me a little closer to him on the sofa. The contact with him was making me completely crazy. Behind me, he absently fingered the ends of my ponytail as we watched the film. “I love this part,” he said, a smile in his voice. “The Rodents of Unusual Size.”
While Buttercup shrieked her way through the fire swamp, Hartley’s hand came to cradle the back of my head. His fingers and thumb rubbed slowly along my neck and hairline.
Oh, hell and damn.
In spite of the frantic scene on screen, I closed my eyes, sinking into the sensation of his touch. It should have been relaxing, but his scalp massage had entirely the opposite effect. It was as if the skin at my nape had developed an unparalleled number of nerve endings. Wherever his fingers moved, an electric charge crackled down my spine and deep into my body. I became overly conscious of my own breathing. My second glass of champagne slid down my throat while I tried to convince my heart rate to decline to a more normal pace.
Then, even as I contemplated my own stupidity, Hartley removed his thumb from a very sensitive spot below my ear. And to my slightly drunken disbelief, he leaned closer to me, pressing his lips to the place where his thumb had just been. The feel of his mouth on my neck was almost enough to shoot me through the ceiling. His moist lips pressed firmly against my body. Slowly, his kiss meandered down toward my collarbone, his tongue singeing me everywhere along its path.
No matter how cool I would have liked to play it, all I could do was to melt back against his chest, my breath escaping as a shaky sigh.
That’s when I heard him chuckle, and knew that Hartley understood exactly the effect he was having on me. And even though my breasts had begun to tingle with desire, I found the strength to speak up. “What the hell are you doing, Hartley?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said without removing his lips from my neck. “Still does.”