Not Another Bad Date (9 page)

He chuckled without humor, and she looked up into his face. “I didn’t mean to imply that she decorated it herself. She had someone do it. Devon never did anything herself.” He lifted a hand and brushed a few strands of hair from her cheek. “I don’t want to talk about Devon.” The tips of his fingers touched her cheek as his eyes searched her face. “I want to talk about you.”

A hot little tingle spread down the side of Adele’s neck and across her chest. It tightened her breasts and messed with her breathing. “There’s nothing to say.” She tried to laugh, but it sounded nervous even to her own ears.

“I doubt that.”

“Really.” She moved past him and headed for the door before the hot little tingle burned its way through her entire body. “I’m very boring.”

A few feet from the entrance, his hand on her arm stopped her. “Don’t pretend you’re not the least bit curious.”

“About?”

“What it would be like if I kissed you again. We’re older. Have more experience.” She refused to turn around, and he slid his hand up her arm to her shoulder. “Would it be as good as it was fourteen years ago?”

If it had been so good, why had he left her for Devon? She closed her eyes. They both knew the answer to that, but the fact that Devon had been pregnant hadn’t made it any less painful. Not for her. It didn’t hurt any longer, but there was absolutely no way she would ever get involved with him again. “No. I’m not curious. I never look back.”

As if she hadn’t spoken, he pushed her hair to one side. “Would you drive me insane like you used to?” He lowered his face, and his breath warmed the side of her neck. “And honey, you drove me out of my mind.” He slid one big hand around her side to her flat stomach and pulled her back against his hard chest. “I was the first man to make love to you. I haven’t forgotten that.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“You haven’t forgotten, either.” His lips brushed her heated skin, and those hot little tingles she’d worried about spread warmth all over her body. It had been a long time since she’d felt the secure arms of a man. A long time since she’d felt the hot rush from a man’s touch flow through her and the delicious pull of lust tugging at all the right places. “I might not have thought about it in a while,” he continued, “but I haven’t forgotten that night we drove to the La Quinta off I-35. Not the best place, but not exactly a dump. I didn’t have much money back then.”

She hadn’t minded.

“We had sex at least five times.”

Seven if a person counted the next morning. She took short uneven breaths in the top of her lungs as he kissed the side of her throat. The scent of his skin filled her head, and it would have been so easy just to sink back into him. To close her eyes and just feel his big chest and arms around her. “I don’t remember,” she lied, because telling the truth would make things so much harder.

He slid his palm up the front of her hooded jacket, and her uneven breath got caught in her throat. His hand lightly skimmed across the top of her chest to her shoulder. Slowly he turned her and looked into her eyes. He smiled as his hands slipped to the side of her head, and he plowed his fingers into her hair. He tilted her face up, and her lips parted. “Liar,” he said just above a whisper, then he lowered his face and kissed her. A light teasing brush of his firm lips. A wet smear across her mouth, and she stood perfectly still.

“This is much more fun if you participate,” he whispered.

She stood still while every nerve ending in her body screamed at her to grab him by the ears and participate the hell out of him. To let him make her feel good, to mold herself against him and use him to satisfy her hunger and need like a succubus, but she knew better. Nothing good would ever come out of kissing Zach. Sometimes the price of satisfaction was too high.

She wrapped her hands around his wrists and took a step back. “I can’t do this,” she said. “This can’t happen again.”

His hands dropped to his sides, and he took a deep breath. He looked down at her through narrowed lids. “It’s going to happen, Adele. If not now, another time.”

He looked so sure, her mouth got suddenly dry and she shook her head. “No, Zach. Not with you. Not ever.” She couldn’t breathe around him and walked out of the office like demons were nipping at her heels.

The next few minutes were a blur of restless nerves and raw emotion. Adele pleaded a splitting headache, which wasn’t a huge stretch from the truth, and Cindy Ann volunteered to drop Kendra off at home after the party. As she drove from the gated community, she called Sherilyn and told her sister that she and Kendra would be in later that evening.

Once she was home, shut safely inside Sherilyn’s condo, she took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Zach was wrong. Nothing was going to happen between them. Ever.

She moved through the entry to the kitchen and set her purse on the granite counter. Before Sherilyn had gotten ill, she’d been in the process of painting the mostly beige kitchen a cheery yellow. As a result, the kitchen walls were painted halfway down.

Adele took the extra house key out of a bowl in the cupboard and tied it to the string of her sweatpants. Like everything else about the sisters, Adele’s tastes were the total opposite. She preferred white walls and colorful furnishings while Sherilyn preferred color on the walls and subdued furnishings.

She grabbed a scrunchie off the counter and pulled her thick hair into a ponytail as she walked back out of the house and locked the door behind her. She’d jogged earlier, but she didn’t know what else to do with the restless energy humming through her veins. Her head really was starting to ache, and she didn’t want to think about Zach.

She stepped from the porch and took off at a familiar, even pace. The steady beat of her heart and the routine rhythm of her feet were usually a comfort, but today it was as if her past was riding her heels. She couldn’t outrun it, and it caught up to her at the corner of Crockett and Third. Her feet slowed at the bus stop near the corner and she took a seat on the hard bench advertising Tina’s Taco-rama. An old truck with a red bone hound in the back drove past, stirring up the leaves on the road and rattling the cool air with its busted tailpipe.

Would you drive me insane like you used to?
he’d said as he’d lowered his face to the side of her neck.
And honey, you drove me out of my mind.

She’d driven them both insane. Him because she hadn’t jumped in bed with him, like every other girl on the UT campus, the first time he kissed her. Her because she’d wanted to wait until she’d been sure she loved him, and he loved her, too. She’d waited a
whole
month. A short time that had felt like forever. Looking back, she couldn’t say that he’d pressured her to have sex. Not unless she counted the way he’d kissed her. So hot and intense he’d left her breathless. And not unless she counted the way he’d touched her. Slow and unhurried, a light teasing stroke to her stomach and breasts, he’d driven her crazy until all she could think about was feeling his hands on her. She’d wanted to feel her hands on him, too.

She’d had boyfriends in the past. Some with whom she’d thought she might be falling in love. Things had gotten fairly hot with some of them, but she’d never been sure they were
it
for her.
The
one. Her
soul
mate.

Looking back, the thought of saving herself for a soul mate seemed like an immature romantic fantasy. An embarrassing ideal that she blamed on too many fairy tales as a child, but back then she’d thought Zach was all those things and more. The man meant for her, and she recalled perfectly the moment she’d slammed headfirst in love with him. Up until that moment, she’d tried to take it slow. Tried to put the brakes on her runaway feelings, but the day he’d shown up at her dorm room with an illustrated book of flower fairies in his big hands, there was no slowing the beat of her heart or stopping her headlong fall.

The book hadn’t been expensive, but it had been perfect. Six months before she’d met Zach, she’d had the fairy queen, Titania, sitting on a rose petal, tattooed low on her abdomen, her wild blond hair strategically covering parts of her nude body.

Adele hadn’t believed in fairies for a long time, but she’d still loved the art and Scottish folklore of the Seelie Court. She had wonderful memories of her grandfather sending her out to the garden with a net to hunt the fairies he’d assured her lived amongst the roses and buttercups.

“I saw this, and it reminded me of the story you told me about your grandfather,” he’d said as he handed her the book.

She’d only mentioned it in passing, and he’d laughed at her and told her he thought she was cute. Looking at the gift in her hands had shocked her so much she’d blurted, “You went into a bookstore?” Silence fell between them, and she glanced up.

Some of the pleasure drained from his face, and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah. Go figure. I can read
and
play ball.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!” But she sort of had meant it. As long as she could tell herself that Zach was a stereotypical jock, the more she felt they were on equal ground. She was the brains to his brawn, but Zach wasn’t dumb. Far from it. “What I really meant was, did you make a trip to a bookstore just to buy this for me?”

He looked down at her for several moments, judging whether to believe her or not before his hands fell to his sides, and he shrugged. “I thought you’d like a book more than anything else.”

“But you didn’t have to get me anything.” She felt her heart swell a little in her chest. He’d bought her a book on fairies, not because he liked them but because she did.

“Look at this one,” he said, and pulled the book from her hands. He turned to a picture of a fairy sitting on a crescent moon, her blond curly hair blowing about her head and nude body. “This one reminded me of you.”

Adele glanced down at the page, then back up into Zach’s brown eyes. Her swelling heart ached, and she felt as if she were being slammed up against something bigger than she. Bigger than her ability to stop it. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into that something bigger. “I love it. Thank you.” She closed her eyes and breathed in the smell of his skin.
I love you.

He tossed the book on the small desk in her dorm and turned his face into her hair. “You’re welcome.” He ran his hands up and down her spine and she lifted her mouth to his. She poured everything she felt into the hot, hungry kiss. Her heart. Her soul. The love pounding through her veins.

He groaned against her lips as he slid his hands down her back to her behind and pressed his erection into her. “You make me so hard,” he said, just above her mouth. “I want you.”

She knew the feeling and pulled her T-shirt over her head and tossed it on her twin bed. She reached for him, but his hand on her bare stomach stopped her. His gaze lowered from hers, down her chin and throat to her breasts cupped in a sheer white nylon bra. Her nipples made hard points in the center of each cup. He stared for so long she raised her palms to cover herself, but he grabbed ahold of her wrists. He looked at her as if he’d never seen a naked girl before, but she was certain he’d seen more than his fair share of breasts.

“Zach. You’re making me self-conscious.”

“Why?” He glanced up into her face, then back down again.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

He chuckled, low in his throat. “I’m thinking that you’re a beautiful girl, and I’m a lucky guy. I’m thinking that after all this time, I’m really looking at you.” A sexy smile curved the corner of his mouth. “At least that’s the cleaned-up version of what I’m thinking.” Then he kissed her, working his way down her throat until his hot wet mouth covered her nipple through the sheer nylon. His hands moved to the hooks at her back, and the bra fell to the floor. He whispered something unintelligible as he sucked her naked flesh.

They’d never gone that far before, and this time he’d been the one to stop it. He hadn’t wanted her first time to be in a dorm room with thin walls or in a house filled with football players. The next day, he rented a room at the La Quinta and made it so good, she’d fallen even harder. He’d been the one with all the experience, and he’d taught her what to do and where to touch him. He’d taught her what good sex felt like. Later, she would learn that sometimes there was a difference between hot sex and making love. Zach had given her both. She would learn that hot sex without strings could be very satisfying, but that the best heart-pumping, mind-numbing, rock-you-like-a-hurricane sex, involved both.

She would also learn that if something burned too hot, it burned out too fast. But even if it hadn’t been for Devon, Adele doubted her relationship with Zach would have lasted past graduation. It had all been too much.
He’d
been too much. Sooner or later he would have broken her heart.

With Zach, it had been sooner rather than later. Her one true love, the guy who she’d thought was
it
for her, left her after two months. The night he’d told her that Devon was ten weeks pregnant, Adele had been devastated beyond words. He’d ripped her heart from her chest and made a mess of her life. She’d loved him with every aching cell of her body, and getting over him had taken her years.

It’s going to happen, Adele,
he’d said earlier.
If not now, another time.

Adele stood and turned back toward Sherilyn’s condo. She was only in Texas for a few months, but even if she lost her mind and moved back for good, the last thing she was ever going to do was get involved with Zach Zemaitis.