“Oh, you want to have a snowball fight? It’s on,” he said as he cleared the snow from his face. “You’ve got a five-second head start.”
Giddy adrenaline pumping through her veins, she took off looking for cover, bending over and scooping up a handful of snow as she went. She almost made it to the porch when a snowball landed with a thwat in the middle of her back. Turning, she let fly the half-formed one in her hand. Ian dodged it easily, but that attack gave her time to get up to the porch, which may have less snow than the yard but had better coverage.
“You realize you’re trapped,” he hollered from behind his car.
“I have the high ground and access to the house,” she shot back. “I could lock you out.”
He shot off three quick snowballs. “You wouldn’t.”
“Not for a long time, anyway.” Really, not at all, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know that already.
He laughed and shot off another snowball, but it went wide, hitting the front door with a splat. And so it went, snowballs flying through the air as he circled the porch, dodging her limited-supply snowballs. The rest of it all didn’t matter. For the moment, there wasn’t a world beyond their little snowed-in patch of earth, and Shelby gave in to the absolute joy of that freedom.
That anxious feeling always in the bottom of her gut, the one that had kept her from walking into the media room a few weeks ago, it shrank into nearly nothing. There was only here and now. Before, that had only happened in the moment between buzzed and drunk that she’d tried to ride for way too long. This was so much better. In the mix of everything, she’d forgotten how to let go and just have fun.
By the time they were out of snowballs, Shelby had snow down her shirt, her socks were soaked to her toes, her fingers were half frozen, and her cheeks hurt from laughing so hard. After kicking off the snow stuck to their boots outside, they shucked them off just inside the door, leaving them on the thick weatherproof mat, and hurried to the fireplace to start to defrost.
“I’ve got to get out of this,” she said. “Turn around. No peeking.”
Ian grunted in agreement, his shirt already half off. Fighting the urge to freeze to death so she could watch him finish taking off his shirt, she turned and faced the staircase. Getting off wet jeans with icicle hands was second only to trying to take off a sweaty sports bra on her worst-clothes-to-remove list, but she managed. By the time she had on a pair of yoga pants, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of wooly socks, she’d started getting feeling back in her toes.
“Is it safe to turn around?” she asked.
“You’re clear,” he said.
She turned and nearly ran into Ian, he was so close. He was mismatched in joggers and a fisherman’s sweater, the thick cream-colored kind that made her fingers itch to touch him—it! She wanted to touch the sweater, not him. Really. Sorta. Maybe. Oh God, not at all.
He took her hands in his, cupping them and bringing them up to his mouth to blow on them. “You’re freezing.”
“My gloves weren’t made for snowball fights.” The knit gloves had been soaked through by her third snowball. “I hadn’t been planning on going to war.”
“I’d better warm you up, then.” He brought her hands to his mouth again, blowing on her knuckles.
It wasn’t even a touch, but it sent a wave of scorching-hot desire slamming into her that made her forget all of the very good reasons why this was a very bad idea. “What are your plans for getting me warm?”
Her hard nipples pressing against the thin material of her tank top were directly at eye level. She could blame it on the cold, but her body was hot, overheated, even—and it had nothing to do with the temperature.
A mewling sigh sounded in her ears, soft and needy. It took her a second to realize the sound had come from her. Her hands still in his, he glanced up at her, his eyes dark with a possessive lust that made her core clench.
She wanted to straddle him, ride him, feel his cock rub up against every sensitive spot at the apex of her legs. She wanted to take him inside her, press her palms against the hard ridges of his abs, and ride him slow and sure. She wanted to be under him on the bed, pressed up against him with the wall at her back, and on her hands and knees as he pounded into her like she craved each time her fingers slid between her slick folds.
“Shelby…” He made her name sound like a naughty promise and a desperate plea as he stripped off his sweater. He let her hands go, obviously giving her the space to make the call. “How hot do you want to get?”
Tempting. So damn tempting. Her fingertips were tracing the line of his jaw, the coarse hair scraping her tender flesh before she even realized what she was doing. He didn’t touch her in return. He waited—patient, enticing, confident—letting her take the lead, as if he already knew what she’d say next. It wasn’t triumph in his dark eyes but pure focused need—all of it directed at her. It was incendiary to be at the center of it, and she was going up in flames.
She traced the line of his throat and across his corded shoulders, the whole time feeling like a woman who’d made this decision a million years ago and was only now admitting it. “No one could know, and it would have to be a different-zip-code-only thing.”
“There’s no one here I’d ever tell,” he said, his voice strained with need.
The springy hairs dusting his pecs tickled
