Page 27 of Enticement
Relief flooded Evie’s chest, followed immediately by a wave of regret. She starred numbly at his retreating back as he strode away from the car, head down, facing the wind. Fighting with the belt, her sex still liquid with arousal, she leaned out of the door. “Hey! Where are you going?”
“Home,” he called, not turning. Having reached the dry-stone wall, he nimbly leapt over.
“What? Get in the car, Kit.” Face screwed up against the biting wind and the patter of wet snow, Evie pitched after him. “What the fuck has got into you? Is this some sort of bollocks game? ’Cause if it is, quit pratting about, it’s bloody freezing.”
He stopped and slowly turned to face her, his shaggy hair blowing around him and his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. “Here, take the keys.” He threw them so that they landed forming an indent in the settling snow. “Drive back to work. I can walk home from here.”
“You can drive back from here.” Leaving the keys where they’d landed, she slowly approached. “I’m not leaving you out here in the snow. Ross would never forgive me.” Cautiously, she straddled the wall.
Kit remained stock still, watching her, his face in shadow. “He might not appreciate you being in the car with me either.”
“Don’t play games, Kit. This is a game, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” he said darkly.
“So, what’s the purpose of it?”
“To see what makes you tick. To turn you on.”
“Freezing doesn’t turn me on.” She scooped a handful of wet snow from the wall and chucked it him. The crude snowball splattered across the front of his jacket. Kit’s smile merely thinned, becoming tightly pursed and brooding, if not quite menacing.
“So, what does?”
Her gaze flickered down to his loins.
Kit laughed. “Oh, right, that. You really get off on that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. So, what if I do?” Humouring him seemed the best way to get him back in the car. Not that he showed any signs of moving in that direction. Evie tentatively lowered herself down from the wall. The drop was considerably farther on this side of the boundary, and the grass sloped downwards at a steep incline. One wrong foot and she’d go skiing into him on her bum.
“I once fucked a snowman,” he said.
“The hell you did.”
“It’s true.” His gaze rose heavenwards. “Fucking cold. Fucking stupid.”
Evie reached him and placed her hand gently upon his arm, not convinced his curses were linked to his confession. There was something going on here that she couldn’t quite figure. His lip quivered slightly as he glanced down at her before turning his head to the sky again. “Fucking Kirkley,” he muttered. The low sloped roofs of the village cottages could just be seen from here, huddled together in the valley basin.
“Kit, what happened?” She wasn’t sure if she was asking about the injury to his brow, or some event from the distant past; either way, he trembled when she wrapped her arms around him and drew him into her embrace.
He remained curiously stiff as she embraced him, not the hot, sensual creature she’d grown used to.
“I couldn’t stay away any longer,” he said, speaking as if to some invisible onlooker. “I realized I’d been running for too long. That people had a right to closure.”
“Running from what? From Ross?”
“We’re fucking lovers, Evie. There’s no running from him anymore.”
That was another smart arse wisecrack, the twitch of his cheek, which formed into a dimple proved it. Evie dug a finger into his ribs. “That’s not funny, Kit.”
“Isn’t it?” His eyes were dancing again with warmth and humour. Too late, she realized just how close they were standing, and how their embrace was not simply comforting, but downright intimate. Kit’s leg brushed between her thighs. His palms lay spread across her rump. “Tell me ‘no’ again,” he whispered. “And I have had him. He’s got a really cute strawberry birthmark at the base of his spine.”
Having spent hours kissing that mark, she knew it existed, but that didn’t prove that the rest of what Kit was saying was true. There were plenty of ways to know that mark was there without them having been physically intimate. For that matter she remained unconvinced about the snowman too.
“I like running my tongue over it. Biting it. Do you like being bitten, Evie? You know it’s the one thing Lillianna and I have in common.”
“You do know her?”
“If giving her a hickey or two as a teen counts as knowing her, then yeah, I suppose I do.”
