This was the right decision. No matter how much it felt wrong.
Chapter Thirteen
“You kids got everything you need?” Lisa stretched her arms up overhead, pushing back from the bank of monitors.
Adam cast a quick glance at Jo for confirmation, then smiled and nodded at Lisa as she stood. “Pretty sure we’re good.”
More than good. Great. Once his advisor headed home, it’d be just him and Jo here, manning a bazillion-dollar telescope until three in the morning. Sure, there’d be a tech in the other room, but they’d be more or less alone.
A night with nothing to occupy him except science and a beautiful girl. His girl. He wasn’t sure he could ask for anything more.
Gathering her papers, Lisa ran through his plan for the rest of the night’s data gathering with him, and Adam gave her as much of his attention as he could. Finally, she slung her bag over her shoulder, said her goodbyes, and headed for the exit. Adam watched her as she went, until finally she turned the corner and he heaved a sigh of relief.
“I thought she’d never leave,” he groaned.
Closing the gap he’d been so careful to maintain these past few hours—these past few days, except in the privacy of his room—he hooked an ankle under one of the legs of Jo’s chair and yanked her toward him.
“What the—” she started, but then she was right there, warm and tucked up against him, the seats of their chairs jammed together.
God, he’d been waiting so long to touch.
In the weeks before they’d gotten together, he’d built up the idea of being with her so much; deep down, he’d half worried that finally sleeping with her would take the sheen off, but it had done precisely the opposite. They’d met up twice more in the handful of days since he’d returned from his conference, and each time only made him hungrier. Right now, he was starving.
He leaned in to nose behind her ear, and she gave a little shiver, tipping her neck to the side to give him access, even as she pushed him away.
“Not here,” she insisted.
“But we’re all alone.”
“Miguel’s up in the booth.”
“Half asleep and watching telenovelas on the TV in there. You know he never bothers us after midnight.”
“B-but—” she stuttered as he brushed his lips over her pulse. “Your experiment.” She reached past him toward the data scrolling in.
“The cluster we’re looking at doesn’t set for an hour.”
“But don’t you want to see what you’re collecting?”
“I’d rather see you.” Naked. Three times now they’d taken some or all of their clothes off, and he still hadn’t managed to get a really good look at her back. The tattoo was of an animal, he was pretty sure, and it spanned the length of her spine, rippling waves of black ink curling out across her ribs. A tail or a tip of a wing climbing up onto her neck.
He wanted to lick it.
“You can see me anytime,” she argued.
He wished that were true.
He wanted to press, wanted to talk her into going out on the deck with him, or off to one of the restroom stalls. But she was squirming for real now, the playfulness giving way to actual annoyance.
He sighed. “Fine, if you really insist on me doing my job—”
“I do.”
“Instead of taking you apart with my tongue.” He drew back and raised his brow. It was another thing he hadn’t gotten a chance to do that he was dying to.
For a second her resolve faltered, her gaze flickering to his mouth. But then she took a deep breath and gave him a look that could peel paint off a wall. “Adam.”
The curl of disappointment was only a little one. He’d known who he was getting into bed with when they’d started this.
“Fine, fine.” He could admit when he was beaten. Mostly. He dropped his hand from her waist, but when she made to roll to her side of the desk, he locked his ankle behind the wheel of her chair, holding her there.
“What—”
“One kiss.” He held up his hands and showed her his cheek.
“You have got to be kidding me.” But she didn’t grumble too much before leaning in.
At the last second, he turned his head, darting in to cup her jaw and hold her there as he pressed his lips to hers. He swept his tongue over the loop of metal and then past it and into her mouth.
And it was the last thing he’d been expecting, but she opened to his kiss. Let him deepen it and keep her close. Her fingers dug into his arm, her teeth scraping just right against his tongue, and for a minute, he could honestly believe she wanted this as much as he did.
But he wasn’t going to push.
With more than a little reluctance, he pulled away, pressing one last kiss to her lips before releasing his foot. She stayed there, gazing at him with bitten lips and dark eyes for the span of a breath. Then she seemed to remember herself. Easing off slowly, she steered her chair to where it belonged. She picked up her pencil and turned the page of her notebook, and just like that, she was back to work.
Which was probably what he should be doing, too.
Returning to the monitor in front of him, he clicked over to the graph the computer was building from the readings streaming in. He bounced his knee up and down, fighting to stay focused as he reviewed the numbers. But it was a losing battle.
The thing was, the actual work of an astronomer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was waiting for objects in the sky to rise and set, and analyzing data, and sitting around for hours on end. More often than not, it was about plodding and patience. Nights like this, it was just plain boring. While the woman beside him was anything but.
She was a puzzle and a mystery and just about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Already, just looking at her or thinking about her had his chest pounding too hard. He wanted to figure her out, to literally and figuratively strip her bare.
He wanted to know her. And if she wasn’t going to sleep with him during his shift, the least she could do was talk to him.
Giving up, he let his gaze drift to the side. Jo was bent to her notes, the metallic glint of her lip ring sharp against her teeth, the long, pale column of her neck exposed. The skin looked beautiful and naked where it disappeared beneath her shirt, the side she’d turned to him devoid of ink or ornamentation.
He paused. That first time she’d tried to kiss him, the night before he’d left to finish things with Shannon, Jo had been wearing a necklace. Before she’d made her move, he’d fixated on that bit of delicateness draped across her collarbone. He’d lifted his hand to touch it, had traced the silver chain to just beneath the hollow of her throat, and she’d told him…
“What?”
Adam blinked, and he was back in the present, in the observatory in the middle of the night, miles of inches between his body and hers. She was looking at him, one eyebrow cocked, a half-grin stealing across her face like she’d caught him doing something particularly lecherous, and like she didn’t mind.
His gaze dropped instinctively to her breasts, but only for a moment. Because he’d said these words before. “You don’t usually wear jewelry.”
“Excuse you?” She touched the studs in her ear and the hoop through her lip. “These aren’t enough for you?” She glanced around before lowering her hand to graze her nipple. “This isn’t enough?”
Heat flooded him. “Believe me. They’re more than enough. It’s just…” Rolling his chair closer, he circled her wrist and moved her arm to the side. He settled his fingertips at the dip where her shoulder met her neck, trailing them down to where the pendant would have hung. “The other night. You wore a necklace. I haven’t seen you wear it since.”
Her smile bled from her lips, and shutters seemed to fall, one by one, across her eyes. She pushed his hand away. “No. I haven’t.” She said it like a challenge, only he didn’t know to what.