Whoa! Alrighty, that’s enough now.
Piper tapped the tip of her finger against her bottom lip. He should have been the last man in the world to rev her engine; he was a commitment-phobic playboy who would never change. But from the moment she’d met him, Jaeger had the ability to short-circuit her brain.
She wasn’t the carefree woman she’d been a year and a half back, though. She had responsibilities now. This wasn’t about her and what she wanted—hot, curl-her-toes and burn-her-sheets sex.
So stop imagining him naked and think!
He had an ironclad good excuse for not contacting her after Milan, and his explanation went some way toward erasing the anger and hurt she’d lived with for so long. But did it fundamentally change anything?
Piper couldn’t see that it did.
She still needed to sell her sapphires to save her house and provide the stable, calm environment she needed to raise Ty. Her life before Simms’s visit was good for a single mom juggling a career. She loved living in this house; she paid the bills; she had people she trusted with Ty.
She needed to keep doing that.
Should she tell Jaeger about Ty?
Not now, was her gut instinct. She needed to tackle one problem at a time. Securing her house was her priority, and she didn’t want the negotiations around her stones clouded by any emotions—panic, guilt, responsibility—that Jaeger might experience after hearing she was the mother of his son.
Unlike her own mother, she would not spend her life waiting for the father of her child to discover his daddy-and-husband instincts.
“I’m sorry about your hassles with security, but they had no way of knowing you were trying to sell me some stunning sapphires.”
Piper forced her attention back to their conversation and slowly nodded. Sure, that. Let’s go with the sapphire excuse and pretend I wasn’t also trying to find the courage to tell you I was carrying your baby.
“Wonderful.”
Jaeger’s hand pushing a curl behind her ear jerked her attention back to reality. Oh, God, he was now standing a couple of inches from her, and with every breath she took, she inhaled his soap and cologne smell, his Jaeger-ness. So close she could see the flecks of silver in his eyes, the tiny scar bisecting his right eyebrow, another on his top lip...
How could she still be so attracted to him? Why was she desperate to feel his lips on hers, his hands on her bare skin? Yet she wanted nothing more than to stand on her tiptoes and rest her lips against his.
Once more, just once...
“That night? Did we—?”
She couldn’t allow him to finish the question. She didn’t want to lie to him, so she stopped his words the only way she knew how: she pushed up onto her toes and slammed her lips on his.
Jaeger pulled away, looked at her in surprise, blinked once, then grabbed the front of her shirt and yanked her back into him. Piper sighed when his mouth moved against hers, expertly, seductively. Without thought, she moved closer to him, her hands lifting to hold his strong neck, her fingers playing with the waves at the back of his head.
She sighed. This was what she’d been missing, dreaming of—enjoying Jaeger’s broad hands on her hips, his erection pushing into her stomach. Piper made a tiny noise in the back of her throat, and Jaeger dialed the kiss up from immensely enjoyable to combustible. His tongue swept into her mouth and his hand on the top of her butt pulled her into him, so close a piece of paper couldn’t have slid between them. His mouth created havoc on hers, and she felt herself falling into the magical space she’d visited eighteen months ago.
Jaeger was kissing her—his hand was holding the curve of her butt, his other hand was holding the back of her head—and he was kissing her with equal parts skill and desperation.
Then Piper felt one of Jaeger’s hands sneak under her shirt, dance over her skin, and she shivered. His fingers moved slowly up her rib cage and flirted with the sides of her breasts. His thumb swiped her nipple through the lace of her bra, and God, he felt so incredibly good...
The front door opened. Ceri’s “We’re home” had Piper jerking away from Jaeger. Whirling around and stepping away from Jaeger, she looked across the living room to the front door, to where Ceri stood, Ty on her hip.