Free The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand Page B

this moment. I have wanted nothing more in this life than to hold you again.”
    “Stop!” Dabney said.
    “Just relax,” Clen said. “You can walk away and never come back, but please just give me a moment to hold you and give you one kiss.”
    Dabney succumbed. She hugged him fiercely around the middle and inhaled his scent and felt a rush of desire so strong it made her dizzy, and she wobbled. She felt Clen’s mouth in the part of her hair, and the warmth of this was unbearable. She raised her face to him and then they were kissing. It was insane, reckless kissing, kissing like Dabney had never known—but that wasn’t quite true. It was kissing like Dabney had known only with Clendenin when they were teenagers, when the wonder of kissing had first entered their lives. Their mouths, lips, tongues were searching, hungry, aching. It was that kind of kissing, so old it was new again, and with the kissing came desire so intense it hurt. He was instantly hard against her leg. She remembered sex with him, how desperate and mind-altering it had been, how it had felt like the earth was tilting, how she had howled with the first shuddering orgasms of her young body, and how he had placed the side of his hand into her mouth for her to bite so that her cries would be stifled. He would later show her the teeth marks and they would climb onto their bikes and ride to the pharmacy for strawberry frappes, Clen grinning like a fool, Dabney sweetly sore and tender against her bicycle seat.
    So many things she had not allowed herself to remember.
    She pulled away and there was a sucking sound, like a vacuum seal being broken. The sun went behind the clouds.
    “I can’t,” she said.
    “You can,” he said. He was short of breath. “You just did.”
    “That was…I don’t know what that was.”
    He growled a laugh. Beast. She had called him Beast because of his size, and his unruly dark hair, and his noises, and the ferocity that surfaced in him when he got riled. When she was first getting to know him, he reminded her of a character from a fairy tale—not an animal per se, but not quite human, either. He had arrived on Nantucket wounded from his life before, in Attleboro. His alcoholic father had drunk himself to death at the kitchen table. Clen had been wild and strange, and the smartest person Dabney had ever known.
    “I’m married,” she said.
    “I don’t care,” he said.
    No, of course he wouldn’t care. He had bucked against convention and authority and the rules the entire time Dabney had known him. She assumed this was still true. He had graduated as valedictorian of their high school class, but had barely escaped being expelled for losing his temper with their history teacher, Mr. Druby, over the philosophical stands of Malcolm X. Clen had used profanity in his outrage, and he had called Mr. Druby an ignoramus (which Dabney had thought sounded like some kind of dinosaur), and it was only the ensuing wrath of Clen’s mother, Helen Hughes (for everyone, including the principal, was afraid of Helen Hughes), that had saved Clen.
    “I don’t care if you don’t care,” Dabney said. “I care. Box is a good man.”
    “The economist,” Clen said with derision.
    “Yes.”
    He was studying her. She couldn’t meet his eyes; it was too dangerous. Green glen and weak tea, Scottish hazel, the most mesmerizing eyes she had ever seen. Dabney knew this because they were also Agnes’s eyes.
    Oh, God, Agnes.
    Dabney said, “I have to go.”
    “Come inside,” he said. “See my place.”
    “No,” she said.
    “Just come look,” he said. “Then you can leave. It’s a step up from the shack behind the Lobster Trap.”
    The shack where Clen used to live with his mother, who waited tables at the restaurant. Dabney had lost her virginity in that shack, at Christmastime of her junior year in high school, while Helen Hughes had been off-island, shopping.
    She didn’t exactly agree, but she found herself following Clen up