Misty had to laugh.
***
After dinner, they went back to Misty’s place.
“It’s kind of dusty,” she said, a little shamefaced. “I’m not here very often.”
“No shame,” Ty said easily. “You should see my apartment in Los Angeles. With the amount of time I spend at work and the amount of time I’ve always spent at my sister’s place, it’s always been kind of a disaster.”
“Well, I guess neither of us are domestic goddesses,” Misty said, rueful. She flicked the lights on and led Ty into her little house, past the spartan furniture. “Something to drink?”
Ty shook his head. “Is this the house where you grew up?”
Misty nodded, looking around. “I inherited my sense of interior design from my father,” she said dryly.
Ty chuckled. “Maybe we could—” He stopped.
“What?” Misty asked.
“I just realized that I was picturing our life here together,” Ty said wonderingly. “Do you want me to live here?”
Misty blinked. “I—I don’t know. Do you want to live here?” She looked at the place with new eyes. “It’s not very big.”
“I might take up a lot of space personally, but I don’t have that much stuff,” Ty said. “I’d fit. You wouldn’t mind me here, in your own house? We could get a new place if you’d rather start fresh.”
Misty thought about Ty’s big presence filling the empty rooms, she and Ty laughing over how nobody ever swept the floors or hung pictures. She and Ty sitting on the porch when they got older, the porch her father had finally started sitting on, once he slowed down too much to be constantly running around.
“I’d love to have you here,” she said softly.
Ty kissed her. “I’d love to be here.”
Misty was instantly aflame. “God, you can never, ever kiss me in public,” she murmured.
Ty made a dissatisfied noise. “Why not?”
“Because I’m ready to christen every room of your new home right now, and—” he kissed her again—“it’s getting hard to remember if I was thinking about anything else,” she gasped.
“Sounds like a great plan,” he said into her mouth, and she wrapped her arms around him and stopped trying to remember anything but the feel of him against her.
Ty groaned, pulling her against him. “I love your body.”
Misty mostly only thought of her body in practical terms—whether it could do what she wanted, get her where she needed to go, subdue a criminal if necessary. But Ty was so obviously delighting in it, in the feel of her. His hands explored her, cupping her breasts, sliding down over her butt.
Of course—“Same,” she sighed, loving the way he was so tall and broad, the hardness of his muscles. She spread her hands on his shoulders and gloried in the fact that she couldn’t even come close to spanning them with her fingers.
“Mmm, yours is more interesting.” His fingers were busy on the buttons of her shirt—no, his shirt, from this morning. Suddenly, she understood what he’d meant about it being hot. The realization that she’d spent all day wrapped in his clothes...
Then it was a race to see who could undress each other first, clothes flying everywhere. Misty was arrested by a sudden thought. “Did we ever clean up our clothes from the hallway of Lynn and Stella’s house, last night?”
Ty laughed, his body shaking against hers. “I grabbed them when I stepped out to hit the bathroom.”
Misty sighed in relief. “Good.” That made sense. She had a feeling that there would have been a few more knowing looks if everyone had had to step over her uniform shirt to get to bed.
Then Ty got his hands into her pants, and her attention was abruptly returned to the matter at hand.
And of course, this was her house, and it didn’t matter if their clothes went everywhere.
Ty won the race, unsurprisingly, so Misty was naked while he was still in his boxers. “Wait,” she laughed as he bore her backwards toward the couch. “Just one more—”