“Oh. Okay. Then here.” I swallow and turn away to my old reliable recipe binder, plopping it open on the kitchen table. “You can do this banana bread recipe. It’s very simple.” I slide the card out of its plastic sheet and set him off to work so I can get back to mine.
We work around each other quietly for the next hour, Deftly moving past each other, we weave our way around the kitchen. We do this while managing to not get in each other’s way. Being with Quinn in my workspace is not as much of an imposition as I’d thought. He’s a pleasure.
He even hums while he works. Most astonishingly, I do not hate this.
My double ovens allow us to both bake our goods separately. As we clean up, I ask him to tell me more about his childhood. Quinn tells me how his dad ran off when he was a baby, and how his mother died when he was 16. How he ran away from his aunt and uncle’s house at 17 and worked odd jobs here and there. Picked up guitar and harmon
ica, read everything he could get his hands on.
When everything is clean, he stretches his large frame and leans back against my kitchen island. He looks so good right now; like he’s always been a fixture in my life. I don’t know what comes over me but I take a step toward him and pick up one of his hands and hold it in mine. “I wondered how your hands got so rough from wandering through the desert, reading books all your life. Guitar strings?”
He nods, his eyes widening at my forwardness. “Among other things.”
I turn his hand over and examine his palm. Running my fingertips over the deep lines, I feel his body shudder.
We don’t have much time now before the cookies are done. And soon after, the bread.
But all I want is one small taste.
He seems to know what I want, and before I know what’s happening, the pad of his thumb is swiping across my bottom lip.
“So plump and warm. Do you know what the sight of those lips does to me, friend?”
Everything feels like it’s underwater and in slow motion. I blink slowly at him and breathe in deeply of his musky scent, seriously considering wrapping my lips around his thumb. What does it taste like right now, I wonder. Salty? Sweaty? My mind goes to a dirtier place, thinking of other things I’ve never done and never had any desire to do. But now…I just wonder what other parts of him would taste like, feel like, deep in my mouth. In my throat.
My lips part of their own volition and with a ragged breath, I place a chaste kiss against the callused skin on the tip of his thumb.
Quinn’s body appears to go rigid, his eyes tracking me like prey. His jaw tightens, accentuating all the angles of his face. Does he love this or hate this? Does he want me to continue or stop teasing him? Let’s find out.
I cease my chaste kissing and let my mouth fall open. With something that sounds somewhere between a sigh and a groan, Quinn slips his thumb into my mouth and I wet it with my tongue and grasp it with my lips. “Mal.”
I don’t reply, only moisten his thumb, swiping my tongue all over it. My eyes still locked on his, with my mind I dare him to look away.
The T-shirt material stretches at the increased pace of the rise and fall of his chest in response to my teasing tongue and lips.
“Sugar,” he grits out, driving me on. I take all of his thumb into my mouth, all the way down to the knuckle, still casting my eyes up at him while I do it. I’m fully mimicking the dirty thing I want to do to his body. In and out his thumb goes, heat blooming in my pussy and my nipples hard as pebbles, screaming to be teased by that wet thumb.
“Oh, you know exactly what that mouth is doing to me now, girl,” he rumbles. “You’re making me so hard I could knock down a wall with it.”
The thought that it’s me, that I’m the one causing these reactions in him, is overwhelming my brain. So much so that a moan escapes me on the upstroke.
Something about my sounds affects him, makes him crazy, I daresay. Quinn pulls his thumb out of my mouth with a loud curse.
His kiss claims me, owns me, leaves its mark on me forever.
Just at the same moment that the oven timer beeps.
“The cookies,” he whispers.
But before he can pull away, my fingers grasp at the front of his T-shirt and pull him to me.
“Fuck the cookies. My body’s on fire.”
Chapter Eight
Quinn
I tug down Mal’s thin V-neck T-shirt to reveal a pink lacy bra the same tone as her skin. It reminds me of strawberry ice cream. The softness. I need to taste it so bad my mouth waters for it.