“When do you leave?”
“Friday morning. Haven’t booked the return flight yet, but like I said, two weeks or so.”
“Well, then…” Taylor wiggled closer, deliberately pressing her hips down, watching his eyes flare with desire. “I’d better make sure you won’t forget me.”
The kiss started out light, their touches playful and teasing, but Taylor sensed an undercurrent—a need to connect that was as emotional as it was physical. A need to reassure the other person that they’d figure out how to make this work, because it was too good to let go of.
Nick’s hands clamped on her hips, rolling her to her back. His hands ran up her inner thighs, making room for himself between them.
His thumbs hooked into her underwear, sliding them down her legs and tossing them aside. He’d skipped the boxers tonight and was wonderfully naked against her.
Nick’s fingers drifted over her, testing her readiness. He groaned when he realized she was already wet and aching for him.
“Only you,” she whispered before she could stop herself. It’s only been this way with you.
Nick pushed inside her with a single thrust, hard enough to make her gasp. They were still for a moment, breathing hard. Savoring the moment. Or maybe just trying to survive it.
Then he began to move, tempering the roughness of his thrusts with the tender way he braced his elbows on her pillow, cradling her head with his hands.
Nick wanted control, and she gave it to him. Her legs went around his waist, her nails digging into his shoulders as she held on.
There. Right there.
He understood. He quickened his pace, his eyes locked on hers as he took them both to the brink of pleasure and then over it.
Nick muffled his cry in the crook of her neck, and then they were both still, save for the rapid rise and the fall of their chests as they let their heartbeats return to normal.
Finally he pressed a soft good-night kiss to her shoulder, then shifted so that he was lying beside her, his arm tight over her waist.
He fell asleep almost immediately, and though her eyelids were heavy, her mind was buzzing too much to allow her to sleep—although what specifically it was buzzing about, she couldn’t quite figure out. Every time she seemed to settle on one thought, it drifted into another.
But nearly all of them were about the man beside her.
Taylor jumped a little when she felt something on her other side. She looked over to see that Twinkie was unabashedly settling in on the other side of Taylor, as though it was her right to sleep on the bed.
Taylor smiled and gave the dog’s rump a pat. “Don’t tell Nick,” she whispered.
The dog’s tail wagged, and the last thought Taylor had before finally drifting off was that maybe she hadn’t gotten a dog so that it had someone to love it.
Maybe she’d gotten the dog so that she had someone to love her.
Chapter 26
“So, when are you going to tell me about the girl?”
Nick gave his mother a look. “Isn’t it enough that I’m making you cinnamon rolls and coffee?”
“The cinnamon rolls are from a can, and the coffeepot did all the work.”
“All right, then. Maybe I’ll just leave them over here, out of your reach,” he said as he spread some of the store-bought frosting on top of the freshly baked—if not homemade—pastries.
His mother frowned at him from her place on the couch. “Don’t you dare deny the invalid sugary treats.”
Nick’s mom was short and plump, with a chin-length white-blond bob, brown eyes, and a constant smile. He loved that while she’d always been round, she’d never shown the least bit of interest in changing her shape, always saying that smiles trumped skinny every time.
“How much mileage are you planning on getting out of this whole hip replacement business?” he asked, bringing his mother a plate with two cinnamon rolls and a cup of coffee, heavy on the French vanilla creamer.
His mother had been out of the hospital for three days and was milking every moment of having her husband and children dote on her. He supposed it was fair considering she’d devoted a lifetime to doting on them.
But his father and siblings were all busy with other stuff today, which meant that his mom finally had her East Coast son all to herself to interrogate.
“As much as I can get away with,” Belinda Ballantine responded, popping a sugary piece of roll into her mouth as he settled into the living room chair with his own coffee. “Now. The girl.”
“I never said there was a girl,” he said.
She smirked. “You didn’t have to.”
“Motherly intuition?”
“No, just eyeballs,” she said, waving her fork. “You smile more. Laugh louder. Check your phone a million times a day, and talk on it late into the night. Classic signs of being in love.”
“I’m not in love,” he responded automatically. “We haven’t been together that long.”
“Aha! So there is a girl.”
Yeah, he’d walked right into that one.
“Yes, Mother,” he said on a sigh. “There’s a woman. And don’t even pretend that Celine and Kerry didn’t already give you every little detail.”
She took another bite of roll. “I want to hear details from you. Name?”
“Taylor.”
“Pretty?”
“Very.”
“Nice?”
“She’s…yeah. She’s nice.” Nick’s hand paused with the coffee cup halfway to his mouth, a little surprised by his own answer.
Just a few months ago, nice wasn’t a word he’d have put in the same sentence as Taylor Carr’s name.
More like sexy, volatile, all-around pain in the ass.
But if he’d learned anything in the past few weeks, it was that some of the sweetest things came in extremely spicy packages.
Taylor’s ice cube of a guardian might have succeeded in making her ward wary, but Karen Carr hadn’t been able to snuff out Taylor’s goodness. Hadn’t been able to stop Taylor from not only halting and raiding her purse for cash every time she saw a homeless person but also trying to coax the homeless person into conversation, letting them know they were worth talking to. Karen hadn’t been able to stop Taylor from giving her entire heart to an exceptionally ugly dog, or from making late-night cappuccino runs when Nick was on an evening writing binge.
Taylor was opinionated and stubborn and sarcastic as hell, but that was only one side of her. And he liked that side nearly as well as the one that was warm, alluring, and surprisingly young at heart.
“Looks a lot like love to me,” his mom whispered into her coffee cup.
Maybe it was.
Nick stretched his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. “All right, you want to do this? What if I told you that if I loved this woman, it would mean you wouldn’t get any grandbabies from me?”
He refrained from mentioning Hannah—the grandbaby who wasn’t. His parents had been there for Hannah’s birth. Had loved her as Nick loved her. But they were too kind to mention her name.
His mom’s eyes went sad. “She can’t have children?”