Free Touch & Go by Mira Lyn Kelly Page A

her breath not quite right.
    Sam hadn’t moved. His arm remained firm around her middle, his big hand closed around her hip bone, and suddenly her heart started to thump. Because she knew what happened last time she and Sam had gotten this close.
    They’d said it wouldn’t happen again, but she could feel his breath in her hair and one after another, every nerve in her body was coming online, charging up and starting to buzz.
    Slowly, she turned, looking back at him over her shoulder.
    “Sam?” she asked, but before his name had even made it past her lips, he blinked, and the guy she knew almost better than herself was back.
    “Sorry, did I step on your foot?” he asked, looking around them. When she shook her head, his mouth stretched to one side. “Pretty sure I nailed someone. Shit.”
    And then he’d caught her hand and pulled her back into the fray, dancing like they always danced. Like friends without a million question marks in the space between them.
    —
    Forty minutes later there was another band onstage, but Sam had needed a break from pretending the turn and swivel of Ava’s hips weren’t putting one seriously depraved thought in his head after another, so they’d settled in at the wall end of the bar where there was enough room for the group of them. Ava’s head was thrown back, and she was laughing with all her usual abandon, that full-bodied sound attracting a damn lot of attention.
    Male attention.
    One head after another was turning, locking on her silky stretch of neck and all that red, wide mouth curving in the kind of smile that got guys hard within one look.
    And Sam had been staring at it for the better part of the night.
    Which brought him back to the same
what the fuck?
that had been echoing through his thoughts since—well,
shit.
Since about ten minutes after he finished fucking his best friend.
    There was no denying it.
    Looking up at the exposed pipes and ductwork of the ceiling, he swore.
    He wanted her again.
    He couldn’t stop thinking about all the things he hadn’t gotten to do with her. To her. All the things he was thinking about doing that very minute. Things that involved back hallways and quiet stairwells, and another addition to his sacrificial panty collection.
    Ava’s mouth and all its varied potential.
    Fuck.
    He was losing it. Because he’d seen what happened to friendships that crossed the line.
    Just the day before, he’d run into Jasper Fisk. Talk about a walking cautionary tale when it came to friends making a go at the whole
more-than
business. Jasper had been friends with Carol since high school. They stayed close through college, and once they’d both moved back to Chicago, they started a catering business together.
    By all accounts, they’d had everything.
    And then one day they show up holding hands. They’re
together.
In love. And planning their forever, because it feels like they’ve already been together that long. There aren’t any questions. There’s nothing new to learn. So why wait?
    Except after a couple of months, they aren’t holding hands and they aren’t laughing. They both have this haunted, pinched look about them everyone can see even though they’re hoping nobody will notice. And they’ve figured out that even though they’d been together forever as friends, being together as lovers is different. And it’s not working.
    Carol ends it, and they try to keep the company together, to fall back into friendship. But they can’t because they’ve seen something in each other friends don’t see, and they don’t like it. They
can’t stand
it.
    Jasper ends up screwing a vendor Carol is friends with. Carol empties the corporate accounts. People see them on the streets screaming at each other.
    And that was before they found out about the baby.
    Now, the guy looks like the walking dead and when he smiles, it’s got the same effect as someone scratching his fingernails down a blackboard.
    Yeah, fifteen minutes and Sam was rock solid on