He grabs a towel and starts drying off, then reaches for a T-shirt, dry shorts, and boxers from a duffel.
I turn around, and he chuckles.
“So you can’t do the kissing booth,” I say, working hard not to envision what he's uncovering at the moment.
“I signed up before we were doing this thing.”
“I figured. And I know you always bring a lot of money. But come on, it will look weird for a guy who's taken to be at the kissing booth.”
“My shift literally starts in fifteen minutes. I can’t bail. They do need the money.”
I think about that. “Well, we’ll just donate the money. Me making a big deal out of you not doing the booth will also look good for us, right?”
“Okay. But do you think you can afford to donate the money to cover what I’ll bring in?”
I roll my eyes even if he can’t see them. “How much do you think you’re worth? Prices are a dollar for a hug, two for a kiss, and three for ‘not dating their daughters’.”
I smile as I think about the sign that has been on the front of the kissing booth for as long as I can remember.
The Bennett boys, including Tucker, who I got the foster cats from, and Ty, who I just paid for the balls to dunk Jefferson, used to be popular at the kissing booth from what I hear. But I can’t imagine either of their wives letting that continue after they were taken.
“Well if it's two bucks a kiss, I can make thousands in the course of an hour,” Jefferson says. There's a pause that he adds, “You can turn around now.”
He's just pulling his shirt down over his abs, and I wish for a second that I had turned a little faster.
“Thousands?” I scoff. “I know these women are not getting a simple peck on the lips and running. No way can you get through five hundred women in an hour.”
He steps closer. “How long do you think a kiss takes?”
I catch my breath in spite of myself. I’m staring at him, replaying our kiss from outside the restaurant. “I’ve never timed one,” I say, hating how breathless I sound.
“Start your watch,” he says, reaching up to the back of my head and pulling me in.
I could lie and say that it happened quickly, but I realized what he was going to do with plenty of time to stop it if I wanted to.
I do not want to.
The kiss is as good as everything else he does. Maybe better. If the guy kissed me like this every day, he wouldn’t have to cook for me. Other people can cook for me. It seems that Jefferson is the only person who can kiss me like this.
I feel myself melting into him, leaning into his body, opening my mouth for his insistent tongue, loving the way he uses the hand on my head to tip it back so he can kiss me more deeply.
When he finally lifts his head and looks down at me, I can see a heat and a slightly dazed look in his eyes as well.
“I could kiss you just like that for an entire hour,” he says, his voice husky.
“But then you’d only make two dollars.”
He gives me a soft smile. “I can’t imagine kissing anybody else after that. How about we go over and just write a check?”
The kiss, the way he’s looking at me, the memory of how he looked coming up out of the water, the fact there are three foster cats back at his house, all combine at once and I feel my chest tighten.
Uh oh.
I more than like Jefferson Riley.
And I was completely right about private kisses being a lot more dangerous than public ones.
CHAPTER 17