Fast & Loose by Elizabeth Bevarly (the giving tree read aloud .txt) 📕

into her mouth when she did. She accepted him enthusiastically, opening her mouth wider, inviting him deeper still. As he intensified the kiss, he dropped his other hand, too, moving it down over her other shoulder, flattening his palm on the warm skin above the neck of her dress. Then he nudged it even lower, splaying his fingers wide over her breast.

For a long moment, they seemed suspended that way, his tongue in her mouth, her breast in his hand, the fire in his belly raging out of control. Then she was pulling away, tugging away the hand on her breast and ducking her head in a way that left his mouth at her temple. So he kissed her there instead. He understood. They were in a public place, even if it was a darkened corner, and there were people here she knew well, among whom she didn’t want to generate chatter. But that one embrace had only enflamed Cole with the desire for more, and there was no way he was going to spend the rest of the evening A) pretending it didn’t happen or B) pretending it wasn’t going to happen again.

So he lowered his mouth to her ear and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

He was prepared for her to say no, that they couldn’t leave yet. And he told himself if she did, he’d stay. For five more minutes, and then they were outta there. Instead, she nodded silently and laced the fingers of their clasped hands together. She said nothing to him as they threaded their way back through the gallery toward the exit, only smiled at the handful of people she knew and lightly bid them good night, sounding no more flustered by what had happened than she would be by reading the program they’d been handed at the door upon arrival.

They made the short walk to Cole’s car in silence, too. He watched her closely as he unlocked her door and handed her in, but she never once made eye contact with him. He watched her through the windshield as he rounded the front of the car to the driver’s side, but she kept her gaze firmly focused on her lap. Once he was seated inside, she lifted her gaze to look straight ahead. But still she said not a word.

So after starting the car, he turned to look at her and asked, “Where to?”

Still gazing straight ahead, she said, “Home. Take me home.”

Excellent, Cole thought. He couldn’t imagine a more perfect place to make love to her the first time—or the second or third—than the bedroom in her house that was both hers and his.

She turned to look at him then. “Bree’s apartment, I mean.”

Wait a minute. That wasn’t home. “Bree’s?” he said.

She nodded. “It’s been a long night. It’s time to go home.”

“Yeah, but your house is—”

“My house is being rented right now,” she told him. “For now, my home is at Bree’s.” His confusion—hell, his disappointment—must have shown on his face, because she added, “We can’t do what you’re thinking you want to do.”

The hell they couldn’t. Had it not been for the fact that they’d been standing in a public place, they’d be doing it right now. Aloud, however, he said, “I’m not thinking I want to make love to you, Lulu. I do want to make love to you.” She closed her eyes when he said it so baldly. In spite of that—or maybe because of it—he added, “And the way you responded to me back there, I think you’re more than thinking about it, too.”

“All I did was kiss you,” she said softly. “That doesn’t mean I want to fall into bed with you.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “But you didn’t want to stop what was happening any more than I did.”

“No,” she admitted.

“Then kiss me again.”

She closed her eyes at that, too. But she only said, “We’re in the middle of a parking lot, just as exposed as we were inside.”

Oh, the ideas that popped into his head when she said that. Instead of putting voice to them, though—instead of putting voice to anything—Cole threw the car into gear.

He’d become fairly familiar with the area around Lulu’s house by now, and found his way back to the neighborhood with little problem. It helped that Bardstown Road stretched virtually from one end of the city to the other, and that the street the gallery was on was only a few blocks away from it, though quite a few miles from where Lulu lived. It wasn’t a problem, though, because it wasn’t to Lulu’s house Cole was headed. However, neither was it to Bree’s apartment. Instead, once he got his bearings and began to recognize his surroundings, he turned several blocks before arriving at Bree’s place—and he turned east instead of west.

Lulu, who had said not a word since leaving the parking lot, snapped out of her silence when he did. “You took a wrong turn back there.”

Cole feigned confusion. “Did I?”

“Yeah, you should have turned right, not left. And you turned too soon.”

He shook his head. “Sorry. Out-of-towner. I’ll try to find a place to turn around.”

He did find a place to turn around. Then he found a few more places to turn around. Lulu kept trying to give him directions, but he played the man card and insisted he didn’t need directions, that this was a shortcut he’d discovered and that he knew perfectly well where he was going. Until finally, they arrived exactly where he wanted to be.

“Well, would you look at that,” he said as he braked to a stop in a wide paved area to the side of the road. “Somehow we got lost in the park.”

“We’re not lost,” Lulu said wearily. “I know Cherokee Park like the back of my hand. I can get you out.”

Yeah, he’d figured that. So he looked down at the dashboard and said, “Uh-oh. I think we’re out of gas.”

“What?”

He pointed at the gas gauge. “See for yourself.”

She