A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

hit on by all sorts of drunks in countless bars and county fairs and musical venues over the years. Some of those guys had even been attractive. She might even have flirted back a few times when Cody wasn’t paying attention to her.

But she’d never been unfaithful.

She’d never had the nerve. She might be thirty years old, but she’d only ever been with one guy. Unfortunately, that man was still running around her head, messing with her thinking. She needed to branch out. Excise Cody from her brain. She’d already kicked him out of her heart.

But Dylan? He was forbidden. Was that why he seemed so…safe?

Dylan pulled the car into the parking lot at Howland House and turned off the engine. Whoa, why’d he do that? She should get out of the car now. She should run. She should be a good girl and try to meet Mom’s expectations.

She met his gaze, instead. He looked all buttoned up, and she wanted to undo him. She wanted…

A lot.

“So,” she said, swallowing back her desire, “Granny has promised to give me her fried chicken recipe. So you’re in for a treat tomorrow night.”

“Oh? That good, huh?” His deep blue eyes seemed to capture the light from Howland House’s carriage lamps.

“Yup. Wait till you taste it.” She reached for the door handle, but he grabbed her right forearm before she could get to it. His touch was like fire, branding her skin, melting her all the way to her core.

She didn’t fight him when he pulled her closer. “It’s not fried chicken I want to taste, Ella.” His words were low and deep.

“Oh?”

He shook his head. “I’m going to be honest.”

“I have a feeling you always are,” she muttered.

“I keep thinking about that kiss. On the boardwalk.”

“Oh, yeah. Uh…” She hesitated. Should she tell him the truth? Absolutely. They had been truthful from the start, hadn’t they? “I keep thinking about it too.”

He responded to this by leaning over the console, his mouth coming down on hers, hard and swift and hot and delicious. No sweet talk. Heck, there wasn’t one thing sweet about him. He tasted like the paprika she’d sprinkled over the deviled eggs tempered by the bourbon he’d been drinking. She opened her senses to it, leaning into the console and combing her hand through his too-short curls.

They were soft and silky. So strange and different.

Wow, his kiss was different too. Commanding but soft, gentle but firm, and erotic as hell. And then his hand worked its way under the V of her neckline to capture her breast. The touch was so exquisite she groaned out loud, throwing her head back. He followed the touch with a string of kisses, like red-hot pearls down her throat to the nape of her neck.

Shivers and fire ran through her body. “I want you,” she said, surprising herself.

He lifted his head, his hair tousled and falling over his forehead, his lips kiss-swollen. He would stop her, right? He was a good boy. He wore bow ties. But instead of talking some sense into her, he said, “We could go back to my place. I’m living alone these days.”

She stared at him, and he didn’t press the point. He didn’t try to talk her out of it either. He simply waited for her to decide. Having the power of choosing was new and strange and seductive.

“I’m not looking for a forever kind of thing,” she found herself saying. “And, you know, this is a huge complication.”

“I know. And I’m not looking for anything serious either. Maybe we just need to, you know, get this out of our systems.”

And then what? But she didn’t say those words out loud. If this encounter was a friendly sort of thing, then it didn’t matter, right? Her inner voice sounded suspiciously like Cody. Was she sweet-talking herself into this?

Yeah, probably. But on the other hand, maybe she needed to stop worrying for five seconds and go after what she wanted for once.

“Okay,” she said. She could hardly believe the word when it left her mouth.

And so she went home with Doctor Dreamy. Home to the place he’d lived all his life. Home to the room he’d slept in as a kid because he hadn’t yet moved into the master bedroom. Thank goodness the room didn’t still have a twin bed or posters of superheroes on the wall. His walls were empty and looked freshly painted. But the room had no adjoining bath, and the decor was plain vanilla, with navy curtains and a matching navy bedspread and a bookshelf crammed with books on sailing and fly-fishing.

She took one look at the room and laughed out loud.

“What?” he said.

“You don’t do much entertaining, do you?”

He turned around and pinned her against the doorway. “I’ve been living with my father for the last year.”

“Living with you didn’t stop him,” she said, right before his mouth landed on hers. After that, all talking ceased. Dylan proved surprisingly adept for a guy living in his childhood bedroom. He’d also perfected the one-handed unbuttoning technique. He made surprisingly short work of the buttons up the front of her dress.

“Did you learn that trick in med school?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. And she didn’t press. He was not much of a talker when he got busy. So she got busy herself, undoing his bow tie and undoing the buttons down his shirt. She needed both hands though.

But when she had the garments completely undone and untucked, he finished the job, shucking out of the shirt and then making quick work of his pants.

*  *  *

Ella didn’t want to compare, but how could she not?  She’d always regarded Cody as pretty good, but Dylan was so much better, in spite of his plain vanilla room and his navy blue suits. Not to mention the bow ties.

Who wore bow ties these days?

And even in bed, he was a bow tie kind of guy. His approach wasn’t wild or crazy or even terribly inventive. But oh, he was slow and