Page 4 of Bounced!

I ran my thumb along his collarbone and up the side of his throat, then cupped the back of his neck.

He tilted his face up, lips already parting, eyes going soft and sure.

I bent toward him.

Close enough to feel his breath.

Close enough that another half inch would have done it.

He smelled like eucalyptus and someone else’s cologne.

That was all it took.

Someone else’s cologne, a stranger’s brand. The whole thing cracked down the middle, because in the half second before a kiss, when I was close enough to breathe his same air, that’s when I found out whether I was kissing a person or the shape of one.

I already knew the answer, and the answer emptied me out from the inside.

I pulled back.

Not fast, not like he’d done anything wrong, because he hadn’t. He’d been generous and warm and exactly what I’d hoped for.

I pulled back slowly and let my hand trail off his neck like an apology. He opened his eyes and read my face. To his enormous credit, he didn’t look hurt, just curious or maybe a little sad on my behalf, which I couldn’t stand.

“There he goes,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He picked his towel up off the floor without breaking my gaze. “You almost had you a night.”

“Yeah.” My voice went to gravel as my gaze fell to the floor. “I almost did.”

He toasted me with his little paper cup and drank it himself as I made myself walk away before I could change my mind, which, for one dangerous second, I very nearly did.

I was barely paying attention when a hand landed on my chest.

I froze.

The hand belonged to someone who’d come up on my blind side, which took some serious spy work, because I don’t have much of a blind side. He was smiling up at me with warmth and even greater intent, fingers already working slowly through my damp gray, following the trail of it down my stomach like he had all night and intended to use every hour. He looked about my age, maybe forty, with salt at his temples, and forearms that said he did something with them for a living. The look of him had me hard, my towel tenting again, before I knew it was happening.

“Hey,” he said as his hand moved over my chest like it was reading braille and enjoying the story.

“Uh, hi,” came out rougher than I meant.

“This whole situation you’ve got going on.” His palm flattened and pressed, testing, the way you lean into a horse you want to mount. “I could stand here doing this a while and be really, really happy.”

“I’ve been told it’s aggressively mammalian.”

He grinned.

“I’d call that a selling point.” His thumb dragged lower, slow and deliberate, tracing the hair past my navel.

My breath caught, and the low pulse of the room seemed to sync itself to my heartbeat. My body, the traitor, responded the way a body responds. Everything downstairs filed an enthusiastic report, in triplicate, underlined, notarized. Everything upstairs read the report, initialed it, and quietly declined to act.

What the fuck?

More accurately, what the actual not-fuck?

I had, at this point, been forced to choose between the guy’s hand and my hip. I chose his hand, because his hand was warm and certain and asking a question my whole body was howling to answer. My monkey-brain let go of the towel. The towel, sensing weakness, took full advantage and dropped clean off, pooling around my feet on the cool tile with the finality of a curtain at the end of a show.