Page 39 of Smoke and Roses

I shrug. “Oh, just looking. I think Darla wanted to adopt you.”

“Darla pinched my arm.”

I gasp, eyes widening. “She did not.”

“She did. When I was moving the arch.” He looks deeply offended. “Pinched me right on the bicep.”

He watches me laugh with his arms crossed and his mouth twitching, and then he reaches out, catches me by the front of my apron, and pulls me in.

Before I can blink, my back is against the van. “Your laugh is my favorite sound,” he rumbles, then he dips down, and shocks me with a searing assault on my mouth.

Inside the church organ music is starting up.

When he pulls back and looks at me with smoldering gray eyes, I touch my lips.

“Travis,” I gasp. “We’re at a church.”

“We’re behind a church.”

“That’s worse!”

“Then get in the van.”

I stare at him, lips still blazing from his skilled kiss.

“You’re joking,” I say in disbelief.

He opens the side door of my delivery van. It’s empty now except for some buckets he stacked neatly and a pile of old moving blankets I use to pad the arrangements.

I follow Travis’s gaze to the blankets. Then he raises one eyebrow, slightly, which on Travis Raines is the equivalent of a marching band.

This man. This quiet, strong, sleepless man who lets four-year-olds hold his finger without complaining wants me.

Little old me.

I feel like the luckiest girl in the world.

With a hidden grin, I get in the van and Travis climbs in after me. The door whooshes closed and clunks with loud clarity.

The van rocks on its springs. I start laughing again, and he shuts me up with his mouth. It’s dim and cramped, with bits of stray greenery everywhere.

“Come here, honey.”

He pulls me down onto the moving blankets and kisses me like we have all the time in the world and not, as I keep trying to point out, with a wedding starting forty feet away.

“Shh,” he says against my neck.

“Oh. Oh, okay,” I gasp as he licks my ear.

His hand is tugging at my apron a second before it’s under my sweater.

Like always his palm is warm on my stomach as he slides it up and up. I forget what I was going to say.

Faintly, the organ starts playing “Here Comes the Bride,” and Travis lifts his head and looks down at me with those smoke-colored eyes and says, dead serious, “That’s our cue.”

I giggle. Then he unbuttons his jeans, and I stop laughing. He shoves my skirt up to my waist, fingers me to spread around the wetness he’s already caused, and hooks my legs over his elbows.

Whimpers come out of me and I bite my knuckle as he presses every inch of his cock into me. Then the man goes to work on my clit with his thumb.