“Come ’ere,” he murmured, but she was already going. Already leaning down, her mouth covering his the same moment her ass dropped and she straddled him. Clung to him with every limb. The whiskey made their kiss spicy, their tongues entwining in slow surges.

This was Leith MacDougall she was kissing. Leith. Though the feel of him burned her everywhere, his presence undeniable, she still couldn’t believe that he’d been returned to her after how she’d treated him. She couldn’t believe that they were together at all. It defied logistics or chance.

This was Leith MacDougall she wanted now more than food or water, and the depth of that need scared her . . . and fueled her.

With a low groan that made his chest vibrate, his hands spread across her back and tugged her closer. She collapsed onto him, arms wrapped around his neck, the weight of her body sinking them deeper into the chair.

Leith. This was Leith. How did this happen? Again? The wonder of it all made her head so very light.

Then his hands were in her hair, tilting her head so he could kiss her in new ways, with new strokes. He demanded a deeper kiss, and there was absolutely no resistance left in her. Underneath, his thighs flexed, pushed up against her, shifting her. The wrap of her dress parted over her legs. With a sharp, surprising sensation, he settled her against his hardened cock, the bulge and rigid line of his zipper hitting her right where she wanted him most. This was borderline obsession. If she didn’t get him inside her right fucking now she’d die.

In the back of her mind she knew they were making out like drunken twenty-year-olds in a public place—a shadowy corner of a dim bar, but a public place nonetheless—but she just didn’t care. It was so very unlike her, and it was fantastically, deliriously freeing.

Close by, someone cleared his throat. The sound made her drag her mouth away from Leith’s—the sting of her lips and tongue aching with loss—and she looked up to see a group of men assuming the big chairs at the next table over. They weren’t looking directly at Jen and Leith, but their eyebrows were raised and they smirked at each other.

Public place. Right.

Embarrassed, Jen pushed off Leith and scrambled to her feet. He was looking up at her with a deeply furrowed brow, like her absence pained him. Like he didn’t know what to do with what raged inside him. His fingers dug into the armrests.

He was still the Leith she’d known since she was a kid, but the emotions shooting through her and driving her body to such extreme need were anything but childish.

The other night, back in Gleann, they’d been physically attached to the past: shooting darts in the pub they used to work in, strolling down the streets they’d walked hundreds of times, kicking through the grass of the central park they knew so well. That night, it had been nearly impossible to separate their past selves from all the stuff that had happened to them since. It had created this big jumble of memories and feelings, old images mixing together with the current, and she had had no idea how to parse them out. She had had no idea what to feel or how to react, and for someone who had so carefully planned her life, it had been more than disconcerting.

But here, in New York City, they were Leith and Jen. Two distinct people. Adults. Drowning in desire. She touched his lips, loving how she made them fall open, how she’d made them all wet.

Someone else cleared her throat and Jen turned slightly to see Shea setting their bill in an upright V on the table. The lounge owner didn’t look at them as she sauntered away to attend to the new gentlemen customers who grinned giddily up at her.

Leith scooted to the edge of his chair, the creak of the leather giving away his movements. Jen looked down to see his legs encasing hers. Her thighs quivered, her head swam. His hand came up to curve around her waist—a gentle pressure, the slightest of squeezes. The question implicit.

“Yes.” She nodded vehemently. “My place.”

That almost-pained look returned, deep grooves gouging into his forehead, only this time, he sighed in clear relief. As his chest pumped, he smiled up at her. She felt herself sway and she reached for his steadying shoulder.

“You okay?” he asked. “Something affecting you?”

She should have known the vulnerability wouldn’t last. At least his teasing broke the spell enough that she could open the bill and see she owed Shea close to ninety dollars. Leith didn’t touch Jen as she waited for the hostess to run her card through. He didn’t touch her as they exited the Amber and not as they stood on the curb, hailing a cab.

Only when they’d fallen into the white taxi that smelled faintly of patchouli did he reach across the seat for her. He touched her first on her knee, running his finger over the hem of her dress, nudging it higher with patient little jerks. Then, in one swift movement, he slid his hand under the jersey and up. All the way up.

Jen rolled her head toward him on the cracked vinyl headrest, but he was staring at where his fingers had found the slick, swollen place underneath her dress.

“What are you trying to do to me?” she whispered, attempting to weasel out of the touch, with the cabbie less than two feet away and all. And the fact that they were in the back of an NYC cab.

He held her tight as his eyes flipped up to hers. “Not ‘trying’ to do anything. I just do.” Then his mouth found her ear, his whisper filling her head. “And I’m going to do you.”

Maybe not the most romantic thing to say, but she didn’t care. Not now. Not when her entire existence had spiraled down to her clit and the emptiness she was dying for him to fill. The dirty, honest words made her eyes shut, and she was a little horrified by the sound of surrender that escaped her throat. So un-Jen-like.

There were four other people in the elevator on the ride up to the twenty-first floor of her building in the Village. Leith wedged himself into the back corner and pulled Jen into him. His huge forearms wrapped around her shoulders, cradling her gently. It was strangely intimate, there in a metal box being shot into the sky. Her head fit perfectly against the firmness of his chest. The top, inward curve of her ass pressed against the erection that hadn’t died, just felt even more imposing, if that was possible. The need to kiss him made her shake from withdrawal. Could this elevator go any slower?

The other people got off on the twelfth and twentieth floors. The second the last person stepped off, the intimate embrace ended. Leith flipped Jen around to get at her mouth, but she’d already tilted her face up and was going in. They kissed like they hadn’t kissed in ten years, sloppy and hard. They were still kissing as he walked her backward out of the elevator on the twenty-first floor. She lost her bearings, and when she hit the wall opposite the elevator, the force knocked some of the breath from her lungs.

When she ripped away and he began to lick up her neck, she found the ability to say, “We’re not doing this in the hallway.”

“No.” He raised his head to show her that wicked grin. “We’re doing it in your apartment. Which one is it?”

She fumbled for her keys and stumbled on legs drunk more on lust than whiskey down to the end of the hall. It took three tries to get the key into the two locks because Leith was covering her from behind, one hand skimming over her chest, the other painting a light line up and down the front of her thigh.

At last she got the door open and they fell inside, tripping over each other’s feet. He was trying to direct her deeper inside, but this was her place and she knew where she liked to have sex. She got him swung around, turning the tables, and pinned him between the small table where she usually dumped her keys and the beach prints she’d bought in Cabo San Lucas. His lips curved up in what she guessed to be surprise and amusement—and something else she couldn’t quite name . . . a dare, maybe?—and then he buried his hands in the hair behind her ears and pulled her into him. She was practically climbing him already, so when he grabbed her legs and hoisted her body higher onto his, she felt like she was flying.