Free Fool's Gold (A sexy funny mystery/romance, Cottonmouth Book 2) by Jennifer Skully

remember what that was like, Brax?”
    God, yes. He’d wanted Mary Alice with the
fervor of teenage hormone overload. He remembered the depths of
despair, then the glory of that first kiss and, yes, Mary Alice
Turner’s nipple against his palm. He never made love to Mary Alice,
but he’d wanted to with every fiber of his being. He couldn’t
remember a time that was more intense or made him feel more
alive.
    Simone was right. Kissing her right now would
be great, having sex with her even better, but if he let the need,
anticipation, and desire build, he might recapture that feeling of
aliveness he hadn’t experienced in a long, long time.
    Maybe that was another thing that had been
filling him with this sense of restlessness, not only the murder,
but also the feeling that life was passing him by without him even
noticing. Maybe his memory of Mary Alice had been piqued by the
recent goings-on in Cottonmouth, but he’d wondered a couple of
times what had happened to her after she left town. Old hurts, past
mistakes, previous errors in judgment. They’d consumed him in
recent weeks. His dead friend, his dead marriage, his ex-wife.
Maybe he’d never shown her the passion she needed to make her feel
alive. He knew he’d never truly felt alive in the marriage.
    Brax touched Simone’s cheek, then trailed a
finger down to her jaw, farther still to the hollow above her
collarbone. Again, he trembled with the warmth of her skin. His
breath came fast, his gut clenched, and his groin tightened.
    He wanted that kiss. He wanted her breast in
his palm, his hand in her panties, and his body buried deep inside
her. But more, he wanted this , the wild need clutching his
chest, the sense that he couldn’t take his next breath without
mingling it with hers. The fear that he’d come without a touch,
with nothing more than the sound of her voice so damn close to his
ear.
    She made him feel the blood pounding through
his veins, the pulse at his temple, his throat, and his fingertips,
the rush of heat across his skin. She made him feel fiercely
alive.
    “I remember,” he murmured, his gaze holding
hers. “And I want that feeling. With you.”
    She leaned in, closing the small distance
between them, and licked his lower lip with her tongue.
    He damn near exploded in his pants.
    She did the one thing he couldn’t do for
himself. She made him forget his guilt. Even if only for a short
time.
     
    * * * * *
     
    The witch cackled, Dorothy fell asleep in the
field of poppies, and the Tin Man cried.
    Simone realized they’d missed more than half
the movie.
    Brax watched her with...intensity. His gaze
traveled over her face, coming to rest on her lips. Her skin felt
flushed, her body more than aroused, her nipples hard and achy. Her
stomach fluttered like one of the heroines in her stories.
    “We missed the part where we would have found
out if they were sisters.”
    His eyes didn’t even flick to the screen.
“Yeah, we did.”
    “Then I guess we’re both losers.”
    He picked up a lock of her hair that rested
against her chest, the back of his hand brushing across a nipple
for the tiniest moment. A flame sparked inside her.
    An answering blaze lit his eyes to a deep
blue. “I don’t see any losers around here.”
    “I think you’re a nice man.”
    He grinned. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that
calling a man nice is the kiss of death?”
    “Men don’t like to be told they’re nice?” She
knew that. They wanted to be told they were hot or macho or hunky
or virile or big where it counted. But nice? Not.
    “There’s always a but that comes after
nice.”
    “Not this time. This time it’s the highest of
compliments. The last nice man I met, I almost married.” Oops darn.
She shouldn’t have said that.
    “But you didn’t marry him. Nice wasn’t so
nice after all.”
    Andrew had been nice. “He just had a
little phobia about catastrophic failure.” As if it rubbed off on
those closest to the ruined individual.
    “I’m