AllFreeNovel
Share Us
By silent agreement, we’d ended up at the table. Sitting on the couch, for me at least, felt too informal. Too comfortable. And nothing about this was comfortable.
“I don’t go on dates,” I admitted, holding her gaze unflinchingly as I answered. “Which you know.”
She conceded that with a soft hum. “I guess I’m curious then,” she said. “They’re not dates. But you have drinks with them. Or meet in the grocery store and then have drinks. Or you just … meet someone and decide, ‘this is the person I want to have sex with tonight’?”
“Poppy,” I ground out. “This is not a conversation I will have with you.”
“Why not? Maybe I’m curious about your approach. I’m agrown woman who lost possession of her hymenyearsago, and?—”
My tortured groan, the kind dragged from the pits of my black soul, cut her off. “Holy shit, do not talk to me about your hymen.”
The second thought was nipping quick at the heels of what I’d just said; Who did you have sex with for the first time? I’d bite my fucking tongue off before I askedthat.
Poppy continued as if I hadn’t said a word. “I could totally be a one-night person, I think.”
All manner of dark thoughts clouded my head, and I pressed the heels of my hands into my eye sockets.
“This has to be a nightmare,” I muttered under my breath. “It’s the only explanation. I got drunk, passed out, and I’m having a nightmare right now.”
“I am very real, I assure you.”
My hands dropped, and I pinned her with a heated glare. “I’m fucking aware.”
Poppy’s cheeks flushed a soft-pink color, and this time, she looked away. Her questions signaled a clear and obvious shift. One I wasn’t sure I’d ever be ready for. It was the shift I’d avoided for years, when she grew from a gawky teenager with stars in her eyes to an undeniably beautiful woman who, under any other circumstance, would be exactly my type.
Keeping the truth of that was the thing I never really even admitted to myself. It was tucked so far back in the recesses of my mind. I didn’t think about it when I saw her at work, I didn’t think about it if we were with a group having drinks at the bar, and I certainly wasn’t sitting at home pining.
But across the relatively small stretch of my kitchen table, with a weakened verbal filter and a violent storm outside that felt like an omen, I decided it didn’t really matter if I admitted it to myself. The risk of any dangerous truth came with action, and there’d be none of that. Not if I could help it.
But while she sat there and tried to decide whether shewanted to push this topic with me, her graceful fingers toying with the glass in front of her, the desire to indulge that whisper of a thought was there before I could stop it.
It was like pulling on the end of a thread, batting it around until more of it could be seen. The thought grew and grew, clouding my head until the fog cleared, and all that was left was an admission I couldn’t deny. If I imagined myself sitting across from Poppy at a bar, I’d want her.
I’d want to go home with her for a night, and it wouldn’t have taken me long to admit it either.
Once admitted, the truth had a cunning way of clouding my head with images of how that would play out.
With a slight tilt of my head, I studied the height of her cheekbones, the straight line of her delicate jaw, the arch of her dark eyebrows, and the impossible length of her eyelashes. When she smiled, it was like a spotlight on her lips—pink and soft-looking.
And this was just her face.
Anything below her neck had me shifting in my seat with an immediate hardening in my pants because my eyes traveled lower. And lower.
Oh yes. I’d want her. And I might not even be able to wait until we found a bed. In the back corner of a dimly lit bar, if the chemistry bubbled up between us anything like it was right now, I’d tug her into a hallway, the back of the parking lot, push her into the back bench of my truck, lift her skirts and find all the ways to make her scream my name.
I’d never had a type when it came to the shape of a woman’s body. I loved curves, and I loved sleek, toned bodies. Whatever Poppy was, it fucking worked. Slender through her waist and hips, trim legs and toned arms, and the slope of her cleavage had my mouth going dry. A luscious, tempting mouthful. They were high and firm, and if someone stuck a gun to my head, I’d bet every single red penny to my namethat they were tipped with a soft-pink nipple that tasted like fucking candy.
She cleared her throat, and I blinked sluggishly. My brain tripped over the uncivilized fantasies, and I took another sip of the whiskey to yank myself free of them.
“I’m still going to call them dates,” she said primly, and based on the heated look in her eyes, she saw exactly where I’d been staring. “And I’m sure you still have stories, even if you don’t feel like telling them.”
What the fuck was wrong with me?
I had a hard-on that could be seen from space, and saliva pooled under my tongue from the thought of my mouth on Poppy Wilder’s tits and my hand under her skirt.
With a clench of my jaw, I tipped the remainder of my whiskey back and swallowed it, even though it burned like hell, and I was the biggest fucking idiot in existence.
Slamming the glass down, I pinned her with a hard look. “You know exactly why I shouldn’t be telling them,” I snapped, an unmistakable roughness to my voice that she should’ve heeded as a warning.
