That I was crazy tempted to repeat it again.
Which couldn’t happen. Already, I was pretty sure every time I looked at Ryder from now on, I’d hear him say the words, “Want to fuck you. Right here. Right now” in my head, even when we were debating paint colors and tile options.
“I need to leave,” I said, and the last word came out like a moan.
I heard Ryder inhale sharply.
“Well, damn,” he drawled. “Guess I forgot all about you and Ryan. Guess you did too, huh?” He came right up behind me, and I tightened my hand on the knob because every part of me wanted to lean back against the solid strength of him.
“Frick you,” I said instead.
“I think you’d better call him and tell him you’re gonna have to take a rain check on your date. Maybe next New Year’s Eve.”
I shook my head. “Nonsense. This is not as bad as it looks. Not remotely! This is… what? An inch of snow? I can drive it.”
“It’s way more than an inch. You cannot ‘drive it,’” Ryder said sternly.
Seriously, what the fuck did he know about my ability to drive?
“I can,” I insisted. I turned to jog down the stairs…
And somehow found myself slipping, flying, and landing flat on my back on the driveway, arms out like a starfish in two or three inches of snow, staring up at the pink-and-white sky, with Ryder Richards looming over me. He looked a little bit angry and a whole lot worried.
“Did I hit my head?” I demanded, unable to think of any other reason he’d be looking at me in exactly that way.
“I really fucking hope not. Let me translate my request from English into Stubborn, Uptight Idiot for you: It would be tremendously irresponsible to attempt to navigate your little blue sled down an untreated road during a storm. If you can’t do it out of a sense of self-preservation, do it because it’s not fair to send an emergency responder out on unsafe roads.”
I closed my eyes and felt the snowflakes fall and melt against my burning-hot face. He wasn’t wrong.
I thought of my Granny Joyce and Grandpa Irwin, the people who’d raised me. Granny would wait up for midnight in her nightgown and robe so she could wish me a Happy New Year before she fell asleep and tell me, “This is gonna be your year, kiddo.” She’d kick Grandpa awake, and he’d roll over just long enough to yell, “Happy New Year, Colin,” before falling back asleep.
They weren’t the kind of elaborate family rituals some of my friends in Licking Thicket had, but they were mine. And with Granny and Grandpa counting on me to take care of them, I really couldn’t take my chances on the roads, no matter how badly Ryder Richards upset my equilibrium.
“Fine,” I grudgingly agreed. “You’ve made your point.”
Ryder reached down to help me up, so I lifted my hand… but instead he plucked my car keys from my fingers and stuck them in his pocket, then helped me up.
“Hey!” I scowled as he jogged up the stairs. “Give those back. I told you I agreed.”
“Trust but verify,” he called back smoothly.
I sighed heavily, brushed the wet snow from my arms, and followed. “So now what do we do?”
I found Ryder in the living room, standing by the custom-built rustic wood bar cart the party planners had stocked earlier in the day, examining bottles of alcohol. “I dunno, Kearns. I’m voting peach moonshine.”
“What? No!” I whispered furiously, as though Ruby Granger might hear me. “We can’t drink a client’s alcohol!”
“We can if we replace it,” he said reasonably. Then he cracked open the seal on the bottle, as if to prove his point.
Goddamn it. How had I lost control of this situation so thoroughly?
Then again, with Ryder Richards involved, had I ever had control in the first place?
“Not to point out the obvious, but peach moonshine is not a plan.” I ran a hand over my smooth head, trying not to panic. “Do we know how much snow we’re going to get? Do we know how low the temperature is going to drop? Do we know when we might be able to leave?”
Ryder smiled a sexy little smirk, his shaggy head tilted to one side and a big ol’ bottle of grain alcohol held by the neck in one giant, callused hand and a shot glass in the other, looking like everything Granny Joyce had ever warned me against. When I licked my lips, I could still taste him.
“Does it matter? It’ll stop when it stops. We’ll leave when we can. In the meantime, we’ve got cupcakes, alcohol, and electricity. People have suffered through worse. Maybe just let things happen for once. You don’t need to design everything in life.”
“That’s… that’s…” I swallowed. In truth, that was a little too accurate, but what I said was, “Ridiculous! Irresponsible.”
He snorted and set the bottle down on the coffee table, then knelt by the fireplace to crumple newspaper under the logs already waiting there. “Okay, then. If you need a plan, Kearns, we’ll make one. Step one, I propose that you get out of that damp shirt while I build a fire—for heat, obviously—and then, step two, we drink a warming beverage.” He nodded over his shoulder at the moonshine, before he lit a match and set the fire ablaze.
Oh, dear Lord.
“Step three, we distract ourselves.”
“Distract ourselves how?” I demanded. I stood, damp and chilly, in the middle of the giant, drafty pink living room, facing the man who’d been the bane of my existence for years, while the skulls of a dozen animals stared down at me. I couldn’t imagine anything distracting me from that.
Ryder’s grin was positively decadent as he stood to face me. “We could always go for round two. I can’t lie, your mouth makes me think… all kinds of thoughts, Kearns.”
And I wanted to know every single one them in graphic, explicit detail.
“Get my mouth out of your mind. What happened earlier was… an… an… an aberration. Never to be repeated. I make a point not to sleep with guys at work.” And given how much I worked, this meant I didn’t sleep with many people at all, ever.
“Who do you sleep with, then?” Ryder demanded, like he could read my effing mind, which was weirdly insightful and also massively annoying.
“That is none of your—”
“Beeswax,” Ryder and I finished together.
I scowled. He laughed.
I lifted my chin. “I don’t care for a round two at this juncture. Round one was… pleasant enough, I suppose.” Like chocolate cake was pleasant. Like winning a million dollars would be pleasant. “But not something I’d care to repeat.”
I was beginning to realize that perpetually scowling at me was the biggest gift Ryder could have given me over the past three years, because Ryder grinning at me like he knew what my dick tasted like—because he did know what my dick tasted like—was gonna drive me insane.
“You’re lying,” he said, not remotely upset. “Round one was fucking amazing.”
My cheeks went hot again. “I doubt it got my heart rate up enough to close the activity rings on my watch,” I sniffed.
He took a step toward me. “That’s not what you were thinking when you were on your knees in the kitchen, staring up at me with your mouth stuffed full of my cock.”