his fingers through his hair in frustration, opting instead to sling his thumb casually through his belt loop. Kayleigh’s gaze wandered to his hips, her eyes lingering a bit too long and it stirred his cock into instant awareness. Not even five minutes in her presence and all he could think about was stripping her bare and pounding into her.
“A date, huh?” Kayleigh tried to pull away but he kept their joined hands between them. Her skin on his was a balm that quieted his racing mind and troubled soul. Luke took a step, completely closing the space that separated them and a flush of pink colored her cheeks. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
She hadn’t changed much. Sure, her auburn hair was longer and she’d lost a bit of the girlish innocence that had accentuated her wide brown eyes. Now her body was graced with supple, filled-out curves and a sensual maturity that stole Luke’s breath. Still had a smattering of freckles across her nose, though. Thirty-two of them. Luke had spent an entire afternoon counting them as they lounged by Milton’s Pond under the shade of an oak tree. If it was possible, she’d grown even more beautiful in the time that he’d been gone.
“Can I have my hand back?” Her eyes met his, and a spark ignited deep in the center of his chest. She could always get to him with nothing more than a look. Women threw themselves at him nightly. Hell, some of them vowed never to wash their hands again after one touch. But the one woman that had mattered—the only woman—treated the contact as though he were trying to spread some sort of communicable disease.
Awesome.
“All right.” He released her hand, but damn, he didn’t want to let her go. “Don’t want to keep your boy waiting, do you?”
“No.” Kayleigh’s voice dropped to a murmur and she looked away. “I don’t.”
For a moment, she stood perfectly still and Luke’s heart pounded in his fucking chest. The urge to crush her to him, to make her remember how good it had been between them was almost too powerful to resist. Deep down, she had to feel it, too. Why else would she still be standing there with indecision marring her brow?
“Don’t get into too much trouble while you’re here, Lucifer.” Her body turned though her eyes lingered on him as she headed for the door. “This town is too small for the broken hearts you’re bound to leave in your wake.”
A gust of cool spring air wafted over him with her exit and Luke inhaled the scent of sage and lilacs, all Kayleigh.
“That was sort of rude.”
Luke swallowed an agitated sigh and turned back to find the expectant cashier leaning over the counter toward him. Sometime between him paying for the wine and turning to talk to Kayleigh, she’d applied a metric fuck-ton’s worth of lip gloss, making her lips look like plastic monstrosities. He was pretty sure there was a song in there, somewhere …
“Not everyone’s a fan,” Luke replied with a tight-mouthed smile.
“You’d have to be crazy not to be.” She leaned over the counter, her arms hugged tight under her breasts giving Luke an unhindered—not to mention enhanced—view of her cleavage. “Good thing for you, Lucifer, that you’ve got a bona fide fangirl right here in front of you.”
She wasn’t even trying to play coy at this point, giving Luke a smoldering fuck-me gaze that traveled the length of his body and settled on his crotch before working its way back up to his eyes. A slow, seductive smile curved her mouth before she drew one corner of her over-glossed bottom lip between her teeth. “My shift’s over in a couple of hours. Wanna stick around until I get off?”
The double entendre was about as subtle as a smack upside the head. There was no doubt that Luke could screw his way through town and leave a few happy—and probably a couple of pissed off—women in his wake on his way out. But the thought of taking Glossed ‘n’ Ready to bed was as about as appealing as eating a handful of