Holiday Romance Collection - 6 Books Bundle (Erotic Romance - Holiday Romance) Read Free Page B

he withdrew his fingers from her body and she ached at the empty feeling they left behind. Watching her, he put his damp fingers to his lips, licked them, sucked them.
    “I’ll go,” he said. “But I’ll see you soon.”
    He stepped back, allowing her to refasten her jeans with trembling hands, shove her hands through her loosened hair, and jump down from the workbench. Jacob was beautiful. He stood barely three feet away from her, his gaze still hot and hungry on her body, his lips glistening from her body’s desire. The front of his jeans bulged with his own want but he didn’t move, didn’t touch himself. Maeve swallowed. Brushed a hand down the front of her tank top and jeans and took a quick breath before stepping through the doors leading to the front of the store.
    “Hello, Mr. Taylor .” She greeted one of her regular customers, a man who always stopped by the shop on his way home to buy his wife a bouquet of irises sprinkled with baby’s breath. “Sorry about that. Will it be the usual for you today?”
     

Chapter four
     
    The rest of her day was a wreck. Maeve could barely recall her name much less tend to the task of running the flower shop after Jacob left. It was a good thing she already had Mr. Taylor’s standing order already in the front cooler and ready to go; otherwise she would have probably given him a bunch of grass and a lollypop instead and called it a day.
    She hung up from the latest phone call and began to tidy the store, swept the floors, make sure all the vases had the proper amount of water in them.
    It still didn’t seem real or possible that Jacob, the man she had married, the man who they told her had died doing some top secret thing protecting the country, was back in her life. And here in Miami .
    The last time she saw him was the day he was heading to work. He’d been dressed in a suit, his favorite black Armani, and kissed her at the door, told her again that he’d be gone for a while but would be back in time for Christmas. They’d made love all over the apartment the previous night and some of the morning, making up for the time when they would be apart. If Jacob was being honest with her then, neither of them had anticipated that it would be three years until they would touch each other again.
    Maeve turned off the “open” sign after the last customer left nearly half an hour before closing time. She couldn’t stay any longer. She had to admit to herself that she was done. Her mind was scattered beyond all retrieval. She wanted to talk with Jacob. She wanted to find out what happened. She wanted him to know what he did to her with his absence. But she didn’t know when she’d see him again.
    She drove the short ten minutes home and crookedly parked her car in front of the garage’s closed doors, not trusting herself to navigate the little red Toyota hatchback into the garage without damaging something.
    As soon as she stepped into the house, she knew Jacob had been there. It wasn’t in anything she could name, there were no footprints on the white square tiles, the lock to the front door wasn’t damaged, and there was no strong cologne smell in the air. But it was something she’d always been able to do, to sense his presence, even when he was trying to be sneaky.
    Maeve put her key on the hook by the front door, dropped her purse on the kitchen counter. Except for the soft jazz playing from the radio that she’d left on in the morning, the little two bedroom bungalow was quiet. Still, she walked through every room in the house, her senses on high alert, wishing for him to be there, sitting in her living room and watching the Discovery Channel like he used to in the early days of their marriage, before he left and never came back.
    She was fooling herself, but even that illusion felt good in an odd way. He was here in Miami . She was furious at him. They still wanted each other, that much was clear enough. A memory of this afternoon, of his hand pressed