Page 78 of Breaking All The Rules
“Hey,” he said.
Bea smiled. “How was your day, dear?”
He laughed, a low, sexy sound that slid onto the mattress, slithered up her foot and her calves and her thighs, and settled between her legs. “All the better for seeing you. How was yours?”
“Interesting,” she said. “Very interesting.”
“Good interesting or bad interesting?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“I…don’t know?” Because she really didn’t.
“Would pie give you more clarity?” He pulled out his left hand from behind his back to reveal a brown paper bag.
Bea’s visceral reaction to its appearance was almost as potent as her visceral reaction to his low, sexy laugh. “It might.”
He grinned as he took two paces toward her, placing the bag on the end of the bed with all the due care and attention a piece of culinary joy should be afforded before undoing the buckle on his utility belt. Their eyes met and that smile played on his lips as he slid it off and placed it on the couch. His hat followed as he kicked off his shoes, then undid the buttons of his shirt, pulling the tails out of his pants as he went. He didn’t remove it altogether, but there was enough flap of material going on to reveal flashes of his truly spectacular abs and chest.
“I think things are already getting clearer,” she teased.
He laughed again as he picked up the pie and prowled up the mattress on his hands and knees, pushing aside the multiple discarded sketch pages strewn across the bed. When he got to Bea, she quickly moved her laptop aside as his body claimed the space between her legs, and he leaned in to kiss her hard on the mouth.
Pie was temporarily forgotten as Bea opened to him—her legs and her mouth—welcoming the taste and the smell of him as his tongue stroked against hers, welcoming the feel of his body, hard and perfect, cradled between her legs. Welcoming the harsh suck of his breath and the deep, guttural resonance of his groan that ruffled over her like a hot breeze and was satisfying in ways she didn’t fully understand.
Every breath she took was full of Austin, and Bea slid her arms around his neck, sinking lower in the bed, taking him with her.
Princess and her very loud, very disapproving mewl dragged them out of their spiraling passion. The look of utter disgust from that one gnarly eye spoke volumes.
“Like you’ve never driven the boy cats wild,” Austin called after her as she jumped off the bed, and they watched her amble away, her tail twitching indignantly. He glanced back at Bea. “Well, at least she saved the pie from being squashed,” he said as he shifted a hand precariously close to the brown paper bag.
Levering himself into a sitting position, he pulled the cover back and settled beside her. Bea also sat higher in the bed, her back to the wall, her shoulder rubbing against his. “You want cherry or pecan?” he asked, peering into the bag.
“I don’t mind.” It was fair to say that the quality of Annie’s offering had made her a pie agnostic.
He reached into the bag and pulled out the slice of cherry, then held it close to her mouth. “Open,” he said softly, and Bea, whose pulse had barely settled from their mini make out, felt it kick up again.
She opened obediently, their hot gazes meshing as she bit into the divine combination of tart and sweet. He fed himself then, and his low, appreciative noise of satisfaction also had an effect on Bea’s pulse. He offered her another, but she shook her head, reaching in for the slice of pecan and making a start on that.
After he was done, Austin picked up the sketches still scattered on the mattress.
“You’ve been busy.” He picked up a few more that had fallen to the floor on his side of the bed and perused them like he was some kind of art collector.
“Just messing around, really.” She’d forgotten how much she’d doodled as a kid. When she’d been anxious from her parents fighting or her father fretting about her mom’s whereabouts, it had helped calm her. During college, it had helped her clarify her thinking about an assignment or memorize something for an exam.
“Are you craving honey?”
Bea frowned. “What?”
He shuffled through the sketches. “All of these are bees.”
“Oh…yes.” She hadn’t really been conscious of what she’d been doodling, but now that Austin had mentioned it, she’d clearly been obsessively drawing bees all with different body quirks and expressions on their little bee faces.
“Has this got something to do with your interesting day?”
“Yeah.” She supposed it had, and she filled Austin in on everything from the email to the phone call.
“And?” he prompted as she got to the end of her tale. “What did you tell her?”
“I told her I…didn’t know. I wasn’t sure.”
