Working With Heat - Anne Calhoun

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Milla said. “All relationships fail until one doesn’t. I’m not going to close myself off just because someone calls me a name or a crashing bore backs me into a corner at a bar and natters on endlessly about the derivatives market or circuitry.”

      “Or glass.”

      “You’ve never backed me into a corner and yammered on endlessly about your art. I have to practically pry details out of you.”

      He paused in the entryway and let the door to the street close behind them. To the left was the door that opened into the flat she shared with Elsa and Kaitlin. In front of them were the stairs that led to the second and third floors, where he lived. Her heart started to pound in her chest, slow, deep thuds that pushed her blood through her veins in thick, heated pulses. He leaned against the wall opposite her, looking for all the world like a good male friend making sure his good female friend was safely in her flat before he went on his way. But with his hands shoved in his pockets and his shirt open at his throat, he was right out of her dreams. The summer sun gilded his hair, picked out glints of gold in his scruffy beard, highlighted his pulse at the base of his throat. He looked at her, his blue eyes dark and intense under his eyebrows, making him look just a bit dangerous.

      The wary look in his eyes told her everything she needed to know. He felt the connection, too, but wouldn’t take the first step. So she crossed the foyer and kissed him.

      The sharp edge of his scruff scratched deliciously at her lips as she brushed them back and forth across his mouth, tempting him to open them. When he did, she touched the tip of her tongue to his, tasting the Guinness he preferred. When she withdrew, his tongue traced the edges of her teeth, then her lower lip. She licked the spot, then bit it, watching his eyes drop to her mouth as she did.

      She closed the last couple of inches between them, and exhaled softly when her body pressed against his from her knees to her breasts. Everything that was soft about her—breasts, stomach, thighs—pressed against everything that was hard about him. Chest. Abdomen. His cock, thickening against her lower belly.

      His hand cupped her jaw, his thumbs brushing her cheekbones, then he bent his head and kissed her, using lips and teeth and tongue to capture her mouth. Charlie had learned patience handling sand heated until it became liquid, pliable. He’d learned how to seduce a woman by working with heat. He didn’t rush. He drew it out, nipping at her lips, tilting his head to kiss the corner of her mouth, then her jaw, before returning to her mouth and using his lips to open it farther, his tongue advancing in slow stages, until she stepped closer, giving most of her weight to his body, weaving her thigh between his. She put her hands on his hips and tucked her index and middle fingers through his belt loops, pulling him closer, letting herself get absorbed in the texture of his beard against her lips and tongue. He turned, seeking out her ear, nipping at the lobe.

      She bent her head to rest on his shoulder, felt the heat of his skin through the fine cotton of his shirt, smelled the scent of him, so elemental. Soap, skin, the heat he absorbed all day. He’d been her friend for months, but now there was the possibility of something more. “Invite me up.”

      His fingers trailed through her hair to her jaw. He brushed his thumb across her lips and said, “Are you sure?”

      There were a dozen good reasons not to do this, not to sleep with her friend. Ruining the friendship. Making things awkward between all five of them. But the look in Charlie’s eyes was one really good reason to do this, and Milla had never been one to act out of fear. She’d take a chance on the chemistry, knowing she’d put their friendship at stake.

      “I’m sure,” she said, and kissed him again.

      In the split second after Milla whispered, “Invite me up,” Charlie thought through all the reasons why this was a really bad idea. By the time he was Milla’s age, his ex-wife had burned him to a husk, both personally and professionally. He’d changed everything for her, moved out of the East End, polished up his accent, ignored the way glass called to him as an artist because he’d believed her dreams for them were better than his.

      Then she’d shattered those dreams in the most public, humiliating way.

      He’d crawled back to his roots, sown deep in the East End, to friends like Billy, to his family (who, for the most part, refrained from saying I told you that wouldn’t work when he’d stumbled out of the divorce with not even his pride). He’d apprenticed himself to a master glass artist, learned his art, nurtured relationships with the overseas galleries immune to his ex-wife’s influence, giving him an outlet for the work he created once he could even think about art again.

      Milla was impossible to slot into a neat little compartment like East End boy or West End girl. American, but born in England and raised all over the world. Living her life through her mobile to the point where he wanted to wing the bloody thing in the Thames. Maybe that was worse, falling for someone whose roots were sown in the internet.

      For four long years he’d fought to rebuild his life and career. Risking it all on someone whose idea of privacy was so warped it included asking total strangers to pick her dates wasn’t just a really bad idea. It was madness. But his body, home to the animal instincts that had led him wrong with Chelsea, the desires he’d taught himself to ignore, was saying this was the best idea he’d ever had.

      Lightning round to break the tie. His body won, his brain taken down by the roundhouse punch of desire lighting him up like molten glass. Peering into her big brown eyes, feeling the lush softness of her body against his, lit him up like only the best kind of risk could. So very, very wrong, and yet so very, very right. Dangerous combination, that.

      But then she said she was sure and kissed him again, and he remembered what it was like to want, the power it gave another human being, the ceaseless grind of it.

      His hand slid from her jaw, down her shoulder, to clasp hers to lead her up the stairs. Unwilling to let go, he fumbled with his keys one-handed until he unlocked the big black door leading to his flat. Once he had them inside, he backed her into the door. Milla dropped her purse and phone and linked her now free hand with his. Charlie lifted them and pinned the backs of her hands to the door on either side of her head. She arched against him, soft and strong, giving him every reason to use his hips to push her hard against the door, channeling everything he had into the kiss. She angled her head and licked the upper bow of his lip, a maddening, teasing promise that was so like Milla. All surface, until you dove in and discovered the depths.

      His beard, now scratchy-soft from a string of days and nights at the hot shop, rasped against her chin and cheeks, the sound audible in the silence of his flat, and incredibly sexy. She writhed between him and the door, tugging first one wrist free, then the second. Reluctant to let her go completely, he rested his weight on his forearms on either side of her head. She ran her hands through the fine thick hair until her fingers met at his nape. He sank into the touch while she brushed her thumbs over his jaw.

      “I can shave,” he offered. Her chin was already pink. He usually forgot anything more than the basics of hygiene when he was in the middle of creating a piece, remembering when he startled himself in the mirror with his wild-man growth, and then he’d trim it down and start all over again. It was a good sign. During the weeks when all he made were the curving, swirling glass ornaments he sold regularly, he always remembered to shave.

      “Please don’t,” she said. She trailed her fingers down his throat to the first button on his shirt, and unfastened it, spreading the fabric and placing her open mouth against the hollow at the base of his throat.

      This time his hands tightened in her hair, pulling just enough to make her gasp and rub into his hand. He forced his hands to relax, forced his mind to stop cataloging all the ways their touches turned possessive. Milla was like molten silica and small concentrations of gold blending together to produce the rubino oro or cranberry glass he favored. Tart, sweet and a deep color he couldn’t stop looking at. She wore a halter dress with a plunging neckline that tied behind her neck, baring her cleavage and her shoulders, a very ‘50s look she wore with

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