“Can you do that?” Jonas asked. “Can you just have some fun with it?”
Suddenly, she felt she wasn’t going to be relegated to the stick-in-the-mud who needed carefree Jonas Boyden to bring her to life. She was not going to be the wilting daisy, waiting for him to water her! She was suddenly not prepared to buckle up and hang on for dear life. Let Jonas buckle up and hang on for dear life!
She leaned over and took the Frisbee from Chance. Then she reached up and kissed Jonas full on the lips. Any Goody Two-shoes kind of girl that she had ever been, she now banished firmly.
“So,” she called to Jonas, she and Chance already running, “let’s do it, then. Let’s have some fun.”
Jonas hardly even hesitated. He ran after her onto the sprawling, carpet-like lawn of the mansion that neighbored hers. She kicked off her shoes.
“Aren’t we trespassing?” he asked her, but he was already kicking off his shoes, too, and peeling off his socks.
“They’re hardly ever home. I keep an eye on their place, so I’m pretty sure they’d be okay with it.”
Chance begged her for the Frisbee. She threw it to Jonas. It was a terrible throw and he had to run really fast and jump really high to beat Chance to it. He grabbed it out of the air. Really, he looked so magnificent that she saw many bad throws in his future!
He threw it back to her. His throw, naturally, was perfect, and, to the distress of the dog, she snatched it out of the air. She deliberately threw quite wide of Jonas, hoping to see that wonderful demonstration of athleticism again, but this time it was Chance who grabbed it out of the air, ecstatic. They ran after him, and finally—if briefly—retrieved the toy. They played until they were breathless with laughter and exertion.
Finally, they could run no more. Krissy collapsed on the grass first, and Jonas came beside her. The dog was content to lay his big head across Jonas’s belly and chew on his Frisbee as Jonas toyed with his ears.
In comfortable silence, they lay in the grass as night chased the last light from the summer sky and the stars winked on, one by one.
Jonas leaned up on one elbow and looked at her.
“You’re not drunk, are you?”
“Not even a little bit,” she whispered. Maybe she had been. She wasn’t sure. But if she was drunk now, it wasn’t on wine.
He traced the line of her face with his hand. “I can’t stop myself,” he said with wonder. He dropped his mouth over hers.
She could not stop herself, either. She welcomed him back to her. His mouth was now both familiar and dangerously unknown.
And then the automatic sprinklers came on.
Jonas leaped off her and held out his hand to her. Under a star-studded sky, they ran hand in hand through the sprinklers, gathering up their shoes, laughing joyously.
He never let go of her hand. They found themselves at her front door once again. Her dress was plastered to her. His slacks and shirt were plastered to him.
She reached up and touched the droplets on his soaked face and then took them from her fingertips with her lips. He moaned and dropped his head over hers.
She took the moistness of the sprinkler water from the fullness of his lips with her tongue, one droplet at a time. And then he did the same to her.
And then that was not enough. The kiss deepened exquisitely, tortuously. She could feel every muscle of his body tensing beneath the wetness of his clothing, which was not really a barrier at all. Their kiss deepened yet more. With discovery. With exploration. It was exhilaration. With pure ecstasy.
It was life itself that she tasted when she tasted so fully of him. The force of it rippled through him, surged, enveloped her. Some slumbering part of her stirred awake, sputtered to life and then roared like a fire being fed oxygen. She knew this powerful thing unleashed between them could not be put back to sleep again.
“Are you coming in?” Krissy murmured helplessly against the rough whiskers of his cheek. She wanted him. She wanted him as much as she had ever wanted anything—anybody—in her entire life. No, it was not want. It was need. She needed him with the hunger of someone who had been starving; she needed him like a wintered plant needed sunlight to live.
The kiss between them reflected all of that and became ferocious with the tender violence of their mutual need.
He reared back from her, his eyes taking in her face.
“I thought,” he reminded her roughly, “you weren’t that kind of girl.”
“I’m not,” she whispered, “but maybe I have always wanted to be. Maybe the right person never came along before.”
And then he scooped her soaked body up in his arms, and she felt deliciously consumed by the scorching heat of him. He found the handle and nudged open the door with his foot.
The three of them. Krissy and Jonas tumbled through it, Chance bounding past them into the house.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JONAS WOKE UP the next morning with the dog laid out across the foot of the bed crushing his feet and Krissy nestled against him, her hair scattered, a sheet covering some, but not all, of her curves.
Her hand was resting on his chest—his naked chest. Something sweetly possessive about that.
Looking at her without her awareness, he took in the thick sweep of her lashes, the delicate roundness of cheek and shoulder, the beautiful bow and slight movement of her lips as the breath moved in and out of her.
Jonas felt the searing and shocking memory of what had unfolded, white-hot, between them last night.
But another feeling overlaid that one, and it was more powerful: he felt the most exquisite tenderness for this woman whose sensuous warmth was pressed against him. And he felt enormously protective of her.
They both knew she wasn’t that kind of girl. What had
