Free All Grown Up by Kit Tunstall Page B

of
chowder. Erin moaned with pleasure at the first bite, making him
wonder how it would be to have her moaning that way in his bed.
    “Good?”
    She wiped her mouth before answering.
“Delicious. This is definitely a point in favor of Seattle.”
    “Do I know how to impress a girl, or what?”
he asked with a hint of mocking. Erin’s lips moved, but the smile
didn’t reach her eyes. She was so infuriating. Why did he even
care? He could call half a dozen girls as soon as he got home and
have them in his bed within the hour. Maybe his self-imposed period
of celibacy had lasted too long. His relationships had started to
seem shallow, based only on physical attraction, so he’d decided to
take a break from sex and try for a serious relationship. The
results had been lackluster to date.
    “What do you do here for fun?” asked
Erin.
    “Baseball games, the opera, the symphony,
trying different restaurants, and Bach loves the various dog parks.
If you’re the outdoors type, there is swimming in the summer,
hiking or camping in the national forest, whale-watching, or
island-hopping via ferry, to name a few.”
    “It sounds nice.”
    “It is.” Blake finished his chowder before
they exchanged another word. The silence was awkward, not
comfortable, and he searched his mind for a way to break it. “What
do you like doing?”
    “A little of everything.”
    He gritted his teeth. “Clearly not
conversing.”
    Erin arched a dark brow. “It depends.”
    On the company . Yeah, she didn’t have
to add that part. He’d had just about enough of this frustrating
evening. She annoyed him and turned him on in equal parts. His cock
throbbed each time she opened her mouth to extend a delicate pink
tongue while taking a bite, but his temper raised another notch
with her rebuffs. Perhaps she was just shy? He remembered the way
she used to flee from him. It could be Erin wasn’t as immune to him
as she was pretending to be.
    Feeling cocky, he turned toward her slightly,
catching her elbow in the process. Her bowl of chowder spilled down
her red sweater.
    “Dammit.” She dabbed ineffectually at the
soup with a pile of thin napkins.
    Blake groaned. “I’m sorry. I’m usually not a
klutz.”
    “We all have off days.”
    It was the perfect, polite thing to say to a
stranger or distant acquaintance. Teeth on edge again, he said,
“Let’s go back to my place. You can clean up there.”
    Erin hesitated, clearly on the verge of
declining, when a breeze blew past them, flapping her sweater and
flinging chunks of chowder onto her cheek, making her gasp. On
instinct, he wiped it away, while his thumb continued to caress her
cheek. Her eyes darkened slightly, and he didn’t miss the catch in
her breathing as their gazes locked. Abruptly, she pulled away from
him and got to her feet, but not before she’d revealed a hint of
attraction.
    He was feeling buoyant on the walk back to
his place, his mind insisting on producing images of him undressing
her, of touching her generous body, of sinking into her softness.
She’d be his first plus-size lover, and he was eager for the
experience. What was that term he’d heard? Rubenesque. Yeah, that
sounded nicer, more representative of her voluptuousness and
placing less emphasis on her size, as though that was the sole
thing that defined her.
    His hands shook a bit with excitement as he
unlocked the door to his house, going in before her to keep Bach
from attacking her with love. She ruined that plan by immediately
bending down to the dog’s level and talking sweetly to him. Erin
giggled when the dog licked her across the face, making him jealous
of his own pet. Bach was getting a genuine reaction from the object
of his interest, not the polite distance she had displayed to
him.
    “The bathroom’s that way.” He nodded down the
hall.
    Erin nodded, standing up again to head in the
direction he pointed.
    “Traitor,” he said to Bach when his dog tried
to follow her.
    ****
    Erin locked the