Her lips parted on a tiny, soft gasp, and I couldn’t keep the smile that felt borderline feral from stretching across my lips. My phone jangled the tune dedicated to schedule reminders. I pulled it out, observed the alert, and silenced it. “Okay, it looks like you need to be at the dress shop for a final fitting, and I’m supposed to start getting drunk in the next five minutes.”

I turned my attention back to Darcy, who still wore a look of surprise. I wanted to lean across the console and draw the tip of my tongue across her wet bottom lip before gripping the back of her neck and inviting her to do what she wanted with me. Instead, I took her hand, turned her palm upward, and kissed the thrumming pulse at her wrist.

“Just give it some thought, Darcy,” I whispered before getting out of the car.

3

Darcy

The thin skin on the inside of my wrist tingled where Tommy’s lips had touched as I watched him cross the sidewalk to the hotel lobby doors. On the list of things I’d thought Tommy Martinez might say, “Let me take care of you,” wasn’t among them. The suggestion seemed innocent enough at first. Sweet, if not slightly insulting. I was the one who took care of people. I planned the things, made sure everyone was fed, bedded, taken care of — I’d done that for him, in fact. But now, this young man that I’d fed at my table wanted to make sure I was happy, to make me smile through the difficult parts of this milestone weekend.

And the look in his eyes when he said it, the way his lips granted the barest of kisses to a place that was both innocent and intimate to kiss…

“Ha…” I coughed out the surprised sound as I finally tore my eyes from the door Tommy had disappeared through without so much as a glance backward. As if he knew that his words and actions had sparked a confused riot of feelings in my body.

I put the car in gear and pulled into traffic. There was a perfectly good explanation for the way my body reacted. It had been a while since I’d been touched so intimately. I was what people called a touchy-feely person. I liked to give and receive hugs. I was just as generous with my kisses. A good back rub could make a hard day or hurt feelings much better as far as I was concerned. I also liked to be kissed and held, but…there hadn’t been much of that lately. I’d been deprived of that kind of skin-to-skin contact, and the absence of touch probably led to this full-body reaction from just a brush of his lips to the inside of my wrist. Pathetic, I know, but that was the only explanation that made sense.