Raven's Hollow. Jenna Ryan

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      Chapter Five

      For a suspended moment, Sadie’s mind and senses blanked. Then everything inside began to sizzle and snap.

      She hadn’t kissed him in Boston. Oh, she’d wanted to, too many times to count, but whenever she’d thought about it, the ring on her finger had become a lead weight reminding her that she was engaged to another man.

      There was no ring on her finger now, Sadie’s overheated senses pointed out. But that still didn’t make kissing him a good idea.

      Unfortunately, the sound that emerged from her throat more closely resembled a purr than a protest. She also suspected the fingers she’d curled into his hair were holding his mouth on hers rather than trying to push him away.

      Fascination wove a greedy path through the sparks. Eli was seducing her with his lips and tongue, with his whole mouth, in fact. Although it was difficult to form a thought, Sadie wondered if she’d ever been kissed quite this thoroughly before. If she had—and she doubted it—the memory eluded her.

      A crackle of lightning preceded another ground-shaking peal of thunder. The storm sounds matched the heat currently shooting through her veins. With her fisted hands, she tugged him closer. She wanted to climb over the console and onto his lap, to let herself slide from fantasy into reality. She wanted to return the demands of his mouth, then simply sink in and not think at all.

      The fingers on her neck slid up into her damp hair, and his thumb grazed the side of her jaw. Her skin tingled everywhere, and her breathing—well, maybe she’d stopped breathing, because her head was alive with sensations she couldn’t hope to untangle.

      The next thunderbolt vibrated the body of Eli’s truck and shot straight up into her bones. Prying her mouth free, Sadie raised uncertain eyes. “Why do I feel like someone just reached down and gave us a really hard shake?”

      “I thought it was my brain trying to shake some time-and-place sense into us.”

      Or sense in general, Sadie reflected. A sigh escaped as she forced her spinning emotions to disengage.

      Did it surprise her that his kiss would be off the scale? Hardly. After one dance in Boston, she’d expected that scale to blow eventually.

      It was an effort to separate herself from him and keep her voice steady. “This shouldn’t have happened, Eli. We shouldn’t have let it happen.”

      Skimming his knuckles over her cheekbone, he held her gaze. “I won’t argue with you, but only because I know what I can and can’t give a woman. More than sex is more than I’ve got inside me right now.”

      She laughed out a breath. “When I unscramble that remark, I’ll probably agree. In the meantime...” She leaned forward just far enough to whisper a teasing “Your kisses rock, Lieutenant, with or without the drama of a full-blown storm beneath them.”

      Sadie knew he was considering tossing caution aside and diving in again, but he went with the wiser, if somewhat disappointing, alternative and reached behind them for his backpack. “It’s time we put some distance between us and these trees. Where’s your—” he raised a humorous brow “—car?”

      “Cars are neither bad words nor bad vehicles. I spent half my teenage life wanting to own a Maserati.”

      “You own a Maserati?”

      “No, I own a Land Rover, because I’m not in my teens, and I knew when I came back to the Hollow that the roads, in a pothole-to-pavement ratio, strongly favor the potholes. My mother had a man friend once who leased a Maserati, but I was thirteen when she left him, so I waved goodbye to that wish and switched to boys instead.”

      “I didn’t know your parents had broken up, Sadie. I’m sorry.”

      She twitched away any residual sadness. “They were barely together when we lived in the Hollow. Molly says it’s the Bellam curse.”

      “What is?”

      “The inability of Nola Bellam’s female descendants—my mother in this case—to commit to people, places and/or things. An inability she believes is supplemented by the fact that those female descendants insist on passing the Bellam surname on to their own female children.”

      “Would this be your cousin Molly who only left Raven’s Hollow long enough to go to college?”

      “That’s the one.”

      “Making her the notable exception СКАЧАТЬ