Page 62 of The Sugar Maple Inn

Grace paused, looking him in eye. “Sunday night, at the Harvest Festival, when I told Abe and Margaret I wanted to put an offer in for this place.”

Something flickered across Reese’s face then. Guilt, maybe. Then it was gone. Replaced by something harder. Steelier.

“Okay, this talk has suddenly gone a little too serious,” Grace said. Her hands slid down his chest to the waistband of his boxer briefs. “Time to return the favor…”

Twenty-Three

Reese

Grace’s hands slid down Reese’s chest to the waistband of his boxer briefs, and every muscle in his body went tight. He took a moment to watch her, really take her in.

She looked wrecked.

Hair tangled from where he’d fisted it. Lips swollen from his mouth. Skin flushed pink—same color as the tips of her hair—down her neck, across her chest. And those blue eyes, usually so sharp, so full of fight, were glazed now.

He’d done that.

The taste of her was on his tongue. He could still feel the tremor in her thighs when she’d come. The way her hands had scrambled for purchase in his hair. The broken sound of his name when she’d tipped over the edge. Reese had been with beautiful women. Plenty of them. But watching Grace Sullivan’s sharp edges blur into pure want…that hit different.

That hit everywhere.

His cock was painfully hard. Had been since he’d first put his mouth on her. Since he’d felt her arch and break and come on his tongue. He wanted more. Wanted to watch her fall apart again. Wanted to be inside her when she did.

Her fingers hooked into his waistband. Pulled his boxer shorts down. Freed him.

The relief was immediate. His cock jutted between them, hard and aching, and when Grace’s hand wrapped around him he had to lock his jaw to keep from groaning.

Her hand moved: slow, deliberate strokes that made his hips jerk involuntarily. Her thumb swept over the head, spreading the wetness there, and Reese’s vision blurred.

“Damn,” he managed.

He was going to lose it. Right here. Like a teenager getting his first hand job.

Reese caught her wrist, stilling her movement. “Grace.”

“What?” She looked up at him, lips curved in a smile that was pure trouble.

“Keep doing that and this is over before it starts. When I come,” he said, voice rough, “it’s going to be inside you, right there,” he said, fingers finding her folds. “Not before.”

She shook her head. “Nope. Too soon.”

“What?”

“I don’t have sex on a first date. Or, in this case, a first night trapped in a tower with a Canadian hottie.”

He felt heat crawl up his neck. “Ah hell. Sorry, Grace. I got ahead of myself. Shouldn’t have—”

“Chill.” She cut him off, that sassy edge back in her voice. “It doesn’t mean we can’t do everything but.”

“Everything but?”

She sank down onto her knees, peering up at him under her lashes as she took hold of his hardness again.

“Grace—” His brain short-circuited. “You don’t have to—”

“I know. But I want to.”

Her mouth closed around him and every coherent thought he’d ever had evaporated. She took him deep, worked him with her mouth, her hand, finding a rhythm that had him fighting not to thrust.