The server touched his eyebrow in a quasi salute, then turned and walked back to his car parked at the curb.
Crawford closed his front door. Considered an immediate threat to Georgia, he’d been served with a temporary restraining order. He glanced in the direction of her despoiled bedroom.
The irony didn’t escape him.
As soon as her back hit the sofa, he flung open her robe, ruched up her t-shirt, and hooked his thumbs into the narrow band of her panties. They were off and flung to the floor within seconds.
She yanked his shirttail from his waistband and grappled with his belt buckle. More practiced at opening his fly, he pushed aside her clumsy hands and hastily undid the buttons. Together they shoved his jeans and underwear over his butt. A heartbeat later, he was inside her. Completely and solidly. Engrafted.
For five seconds—ten?—neither of them moved, not even to breathe, possibly because they couldn’t quite believe that they’d reached this point of no return without kissing or wooing or foreplay.
Then he braced himself above her by placing one hand on the edge of the seat cushion, the other on the arm of the sofa behind her head, and began pumping into her. The angle of each thrust was perfect, the friction electrifying. Yet, greedy for more, she dug her heels in and tilted her hips up to amplify the grinding motion of his.
In a shockingly short time, she was gathering fistfuls of his shirt, then her hands moved up to his shoulders, where they held on, her fingers digging into the firm muscles. Her back arched and held in a silent plea for one more stroke…one more glide…one more… And she came.
The instant he felt her helpless clenching, he surrendered to his own climax. The intensity of it caused his arms to collapse. He settled heavily on top of her, pulsing inside her, his breath hot and damp against her neck as he groaned, “Christ, christ.”
The echo of Crawford’s grating voice jarred Holly out of the dream, which had been a startlingly lifelike reenactment, and her body had responded accordingly. Her heart was thudding. She was short-winded. Her sex was achy and wet and feverish.
Do you remember it like I do?
Throwing back the sheet, she got out of bed and went into her bathroom. She turned on the faucet and splashed cold water on her face. But it didn’t wash away the memory of Crawford sprawled on her chest, his own expanding like bellows while he took a few moments to catch his breath. Precious few moments, however. Then he abruptly raised his head and looked directly into her eyes from a distance of mere inches.
Her hands now trembling with the memory, she turned off the faucet and dried her face. As she lowered the towel and saw her image in the mirror above the sink, she realized that this is the way she must have looked to him in that moment: hair straggling over her face, eyes glazed and dilated, cheeks flushed, lips parted in bewilderment over what had just happened.
Then as now, her nipples had been so tight underneath her t-shirt, so sensitized, that the abrasion of the soft cloth had been enough to send tingles through her. If he had touched them in that moment, brushed his tongue across them, even fanned them with his breath, her heart might have burst from the pleasure.
But he hadn’t. He had broken that moment of shared wonderment by slipping out of her and levering himself off the sofa. That’s when she was struck with the enormity of what they’d done, the sheer calamity of it. Frantically, she’d pulled down her t-shirt and crammed the hem between her thighs. She rolled onto her side and drew herself into a ball. But there was no cause for modesty, because, by then, he was making his way out, his boot heels thudding against the hardwood floor.
Of all the factors relating to that event, the one that surprised her most was her own spontaneity. She hadn’t paused even long enough to ask herself Should I or shouldn’t I? She had simply acted on a propulsive desire without giving any thought to the wrongness or rightness of it.
Which was unlike her. Following her father’s abandonment, her mother had relinquished all major decision making to her. Bearing that much responsibility, she had carefully weighed every decision. She couldn’t afford to make one wrong turn, because her future, as well as her mother’s, had depended on correctness.
There had been no place in her life, ever, for caprice.
As she gazed at her reflection now, she realized that, despite the consequences that might arise from that one rash act, she didn’t regret it as much as she should. Had she been her careful and cautious self, she would have missed those thousands of incredible physical sensations. She would have missed those erotically charged moments measured by the cadence of their hard breathing. She would have missed the utter wildness of it, the untempered carnality. She would have missed…him.