Love and the Laws of Motion Page 16

  “That may be, but I still don’t want to know about it.”

  “Come on, let your dad have a little fun.” He slung an arm across her shoulders. His friendly affection was a blessing and a curse. The closer he got, the harder it was to think clearly. Her body got all flushed and she had to duck her head to hide the heat in her cheeks. “His idea of fun used to be fishing with Uncle Richie,” she muttered.

  “Trust me, he’s having a lot more fun with Teresa tonight.”

  Right. Sex. The sex literally everybody seemed to be having except her. And here she was next to the one guy she was desperate to climb on top of, his arm wrapped around her like they were...like they were something, dammit! And yet, when they got home, he’d tell her good-night and she’d spend the rest of the night lying in bed, fantasizing about him, imagining doing all kinds of things with him, too afraid of messing up what they had to push for anything more.

  But what did they have, really? A working relationship and a friendship, both probably with an expiration date, because she knew he wasn’t sticking around for the long term.

  So what was she protecting? If he was going to cut and run eventually anyway, why should she be content with this tepid, friendly affection when she wanted a lot more? When she was pretty sure he wanted more, too. He wouldn’t have kissed her that way if he didn’t want her at least a little.

  As they passed in front of Vinelli’s Meats, she stopped walking. Nick turned back to look at her. “What is it, Liv?”

  When she said nothing, he took a step toward her. “Is everything okay?”

  Inhaling deeply, she licked her lips and prepared to jump off a very high cliff without any idea what was waiting at the bottom. “I want to try something.”

  * * *

  Livie took a step closer to him, close enough that, if he wanted to, Nick could touch her hand with his without even lifting his arm. Close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body. Her eyes glimmered, fixed on his face. “Hold still. And tell me to stop if you don’t want this.”

  His mind lurched to a halt, like a needle dragging across a record. His blood began to pound in his veins as the air between them crackled with an awareness he was all too familiar with. He knew what came next. And some part of his brain—the nice, honorable, smart part of his brain—thought maybe he should stop this before something happened they couldn’t undo.

  But he didn’t stop her. He didn’t move at all as she moved even closer, as she set one hand on his shoulder and laid one hand along his jaw, as light as a whisper. He didn’t stop her as she looked into his eyes, her own dark and glittering in the reflected streetlight. And he didn’t stop her as she pushed to her toes and pressed her lips to his.

  Oh, Christ—soft and sweet and warm and every damned thing he’d been trying so hard to forget. Now it all came rushing back, and his hands curled into fists as he resisted grabbing hold of her.

  Slowly, she leaned back and opened her eyes, looking at him expectantly. She was waiting, because she was a good and decent person, for him to sort out what he wanted, if he wanted her.

  He drew in a deep breath. Blew it out slowly. Waited for the right words to assemble themselves in his brain. “Livie...”

  “I know what you’re going to say. I know Poppy messed with your head and you’re in a bad place. I know you’re not looking for forever or even next month. I know all that. And I don’t care.”

  “This is, um, unexpected.” He was stalling for time and he knew it, scrambling to figure out which response was the right one.

  “But is it really, though? Nick, you kissed me.”

  “I did.”

  “So?” She lifted one eyebrow, that same challenging, knowing look she’d given him back at the bar, the one that had totally scrambled his brain cells. It was so fucking hot.

  Fuck it. He wasn’t spending one more second stalling, trying to talk himself out of what he really wanted to do. He reached out with both hands, took her face between his palms, pulled her in, and kissed her hard.

  Part of him knew she had a point about all of this—his life was a mess. He was a mess. He was about as bad for a girl like Livie as it was possible to be, but he didn’t care either. Right now, he was practically howling at the moon, fucking delighted to have this chance to do the thing he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about for two weeks.

  Her hands found their way to his shoulders and she melted into him. He teased her lips apart and she opened for him, letting his tongue invade her mouth. He slipped an arm around her waist, pulling her firmly up against his body. Last time—that impulsive fumble in the hallway—his head had been such a mess and blurry with alcohol, that he missed what it truly felt like to kiss Livie. He wasn’t making that mistake tonight.

  She was all softness in his arms, those amazing breasts pressed against his chest, her thighs brushing his, her silky hair tickling the back of his hand. Her kiss was totally unstudied, which was—surprisingly—hot as hell. It had been a long time since he’d kissed someone inexperienced. She wasn’t trying to seduce him with her sophisticated technique, or trying to bring him to his knees with some erotic trick she’d read about online. She just kissed him, let herself be kissed by him, let him explore her mouth with his tongue, slowly, thoroughly, and for a very long time. And that was enough, all by itself, to nearly bring him to his knees.

  Somehow he’d managed to back her up against the steel rolling security gate of the butcher shop. Livie’s hands gripped his shoulders, then slowly slid up into his hair. The feeling of her fingernails scraping the base of his neck sent a tremor of desire shafting through his body.

  He kissed across to her ear, tonguing her earlobe. She sighed, a shaky little exhale that made his dick twitch. The skin of her neck was silky, smooth, and warm under his lips, exactly the way he’d been imagining. Her head fell back, making the metal gate behind her rattle. His hand was drifting north from her waist, and she was doing nothing to stop him. When he cupped the magnificent fullness of her breast with his palm, she sighed again, and this time, his dick did more than twitch. With his other hand, he pulled her hips tighter to his, pressing against the rapidly increasing swell of his cock.

  Who knew how long he’d have pinned her to the gate, grinding against her? But a couple of pedestrians passed behind them on the sidewalk, one chuckling and whispering to the other. Okay, this definitely wasn’t the place.

  He drew back enough to make out Livie’s face. Her lips were slightly swollen, sheened with moisture, parted and ready for him to kiss again. And God, he wanted to. Kissing, touching, and a whole lot more. But there was something he needed to say, a niggling of guilt that needed to be dispelled. The last thing he’d ever want to do was hurt her, but she deserved to know there was every possibility he’d wind up doing it anyway.

  “You’re not wrong, you know.”

  “About what?” she whispered. He could feel her words on his lips more than he could hear them.

  “I’m a mess right now. You deserve better, Livie. You—”

  She reached up and pressed two fingers to his mouth. “I told you, I don’t care. I want you.” Those words sparked a warm glow in his chest, something more than lust, but something he was happy not to examine too closely tonight.

  Maybe tomorrow, in the cold light of day, he’d have second thoughts, reservations. Right now, there was nothing but the pure satisfaction of her declaration humming through his blood. He didn’t care about the rest of it either. Tonight, all he wanted was her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Nick, this is amazing,” Livie said as she sat cross-legged on his bed, scrolling through the first set of data he’d produced on her laptop. “I can’t believe you processed this much data this quickly.”

  He’d had to do something to keep himself busy for the past week. Since that night outside the bar, they’d done plenty of kissing, but not much more than that
. Clothes had stayed on, they’d stayed vertical, and usually, it happened downstairs in the living room or the kitchen—where, in theory—someone could walk in at any moment. All of that had been intentional on Nick’s part. He was trying to be a decent guy and take this easy, even though he was going slowly mad imagining everything they weren’t doing. Nothing like throwing yourself into a complex batch of coding as a distraction.

  “I didn’t process anything. The program did.”

  “But this is incredibly complex data.”

  He shrugged, swelling slightly with pride. His achievements always felt better when Livie was the one he was impressing, because blowing her mind wasn’t easy. “Nothing’s all that complex if you write the right algorithm.”

  “I thought it would take weeks to crunch these numbers.”

  “Not if you’ve got me, it doesn’t.” He leaned across the bed, laid his hand against the back of her neck, and kissed her. “Now tell me how brilliant I am.”

  “You’re brilliant,” she muttered against his mouth before looking back to the screen. “I need to analyze these for patterns. If I find a pattern, we can identify an area of the sky where we have a good shot at predicting an event.”

  “Tell me what you’re looking for and I’ll build a machine learning algorithm.”

  “In some instances, human beings are better at recognizing repeating patterns than computers, you know.”

  “That cannot be true.”

  “It is! A lot of astronomy researchers recruit people to analyze data for exactly that reason. They call them citizen astronomers.”

  “I’m going to build an algorithm anyway. Then you can tell me who’s faster.”

  She smiled at him, hiking one eyebrow in that way that drove him crazy. “Is it so impossible to believe that humans could be better at something than a computer?” Damn, she was cute when she was teasing him.

  His eyes dropped to her cleavage, exposed tonight since she’d left off her baggy flannel shirt and was wearing only a tank top. “Humans are a lot better at some things,” he murmured.

  She wasn’t paying attention anymore, her eyes back on her screen. “When I find repeating patterns, it will let us begin to build a profile—”

  Nick cut her off with another kiss. She let out a muffled yelp of surprise, but then relaxed against him, letting him tease her lips apart and stroke her tongue with his own. Without breaking the kiss, he slid her laptop out of her hands and closed it. Analysis could wait.

  Tearing her lips away from his, she tried to retrieve her computer. “But—”

  He set it on the nightstand by the bed. “Later. Coding turns me on.”

  She laughed before he kissed her again. That wasn’t entirely a joke. Cracking a thorny problem always left him buzzing with adrenaline needing an outlet. And here was Livie, sitting on his bed next to him, getting all excited about science. How was he supposed to resist that? She had no idea how hot she was when she was obsessing over data.

  She let him tumble her onto her back and deepen the kiss. Her hands slid up into his hair. His knee insinuated itself between hers. The kiss went from playful to hot. He nipped at her bottom lip, and dragged his tongue across the roof of her mouth. His hand curled into her waist, his thumb sweeping back and forth, right under the hem of her shirt.

  Livie bent her right leg and suddenly his hips slid right in between her thighs. Ah, Jesus, that felt good. He fought down the urge to grind himself against her, keeping some small distance between them.

  Then, slowly and deliberately, she hooked her calf behind his hips and hauled him in flush against herself.

  His breathing stalled in his chest.

  “Shit,” he groaned, pressing his forehead to her shoulder. This was why he’d been trying to go slow.

  Livie had never done this before, and he had no idea how he was supposed to handle that. He’d never been with a virgin, not even when he was one himself. His first time, when he was fifteen, had been with a seventeen-year-old high school senior at computer camp. As much as he wanted Livie, as much as she seemed to want him, he couldn’t help but wonder if it would be a mistake, her throwing it away on someone as unworthy as him. He was a mess—no good for anyone. But that eminently responsible voice was continually being drowned out by his libido, and Livie wasn’t helping.

  And now here they were, tangled together on his bed, the door closed, and the house silent. Jess was at Alex’s, Gemma was at the bar, and John had taken Teresa to his brother’s place on City Island for the weekend. No one would put a stop to this, unless he did.

  He shifted his weight, intending to regain some distance and, hopefully, a little sanity, but somehow their hips collided again. He was hard as a goddamned rock, straining against the fly of his jeans, and incredibly sensitive. Again, he groaned.

  “Livie—”

  Her hand was on his hip, and now she slid it up under his shirt, over his ribs. Her palm felt like fire, branding his skin.

  “I think you should take this off,” she murmured, tugging on his T-shirt.

  He lifted his head, looking down into her face. Ah, hell. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and sexy, her thick lashes casting shadows on her cheekbones. Her lips were flushed pink and parted. Her chest rose and fell underneath him as she dragged in a breath. Why couldn’t he do this again? There was a good reason he’d been avoiding it, right? But what was it? Why couldn’t he strip off his shirt as she asked, and then strip off hers, and then strip off everything else and bury himself in her? She wanted him to. It was right there, all over her face. He wanted to—so bad that it literally hurt.

  Then she reached up a hand to touch his face, laying her palm on his cheek, running the pad of her thumb along his bottom lip, and the tenderness of her expression brought it all back. This wouldn’t just be sex for Livie. He wasn’t sure it would just be sex for him either. And this was a colossally bad time for him to be starting something when he had no idea if he could finish it.

  “Livie, I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

  “I want to.”

  “I know. So do I.” God, he wanted to. Every molecule of his body wanted to.

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “But—”

  She brought her other hand to his face, holding him still and silencing him. “It’s okay, Nick. It won’t change anything.”

  A greater lie had never been told, and he opened his mouth to say so, to tell her that sex would most definitely change things, but then she leaned up and kissed him with such luxurious thoroughness that for a minute, he forgot his own name, never mind all those imminently rational arguments against this. She was shifting her hips against his, torturing his swollen cock at the same time she teased his tongue with hers.

  He was going to lose this fight. He realized that even before she reached for his hand and placed it over her breast. But once that glorious warm flesh was in his hand, it was all over.

  “I want this, Nick. I want you. I want it to be you.”

  Her words finished him off. He might have been able to do the right thing if it only entailed reining in his own desire. Maybe. But there was no way he could fight hers, too.

  So he kissed her back, and he squeezed her breast, and she moaned into his mouth, and his cock swelled. Now that he’d given in, now that he knew he was going to do this, his body was practically shaking with anticipation. It felt like he might explode with the slightest provocation. But...

  This was her first time.

  Just because he’d crossed his own line and decided to do this, that didn’t mean he had leave to tear her clothes off and take her. He was determined to make this good for her. That was the very least he could do.

  * * *

  Livie’s entire body vibrated with desire. She’d never in her life wanted something as much as she wanted this with Nick. She wanted him on top of her, inside of her—she wa
nted everything with him, everything there was to feel, everything there was to know.

  But to her endless frustration, instead of getting on with it, he slowed down. She managed to get him out of his shirt, but he made no move to take off hers. His hand left her breast, coming up to gently cradle her face instead. He rolled them both to their sides and kissed her—just kissed—which was nice. Nick’s kisses usually made her weak in the knees. But right now, parts of her besides her lips were desperate to be touched and he wasn’t making a move.

  Finally, she pushed him away and sat up.

  “Livie, what’s wrong—?”

  His words trailed away as she lifted her arms and stripped off her shirt. It was gratifying, the way his eyes zeroed in on her breasts and stayed there, like he couldn’t look away. She’d thought she’d feel embarrassed, undressing in front of a man, but there was none of that now. She felt beautiful and sexy and turned on. As he stared at her, she reached behind herself and slowly unhooked her bra. Nick swallowed so hard she could see his throat move.

  She reached for the straps, about to shrug out of it, but he held up a hand to stop her.

  “Wait. Can I?”

  She dropped her hands to her sides, holding still, trembling only a little bit as he reached up and slid the straps down her arms. He bit his lip and his eyes practically devoured her as her bare breasts came into view. Tossing her bra to the floor, he lifted a hand and slowly placed it over her right breast and squeezed gently.

  Oh. She hadn’t expected—hadn’t known—it could feel so good, that it could make her heart pound and her sex ache. And that was before he slowly swept his thumb across her hardened nipple. She couldn’t help the involuntary little gasp of pleasure she let out.

  With a sound somewhere between a groan and a growl, Nick slid his free hand up under her hair, grasping her by the back of the neck and pulling her forward into a hard kiss. Without breaking their kiss, he reared up, leaned over her, and laid her on her back. Then he pulled back to look down at her, and sucked in a breath.