One Little Thing by Kimberly Lang

away to break the physical connection between them. His hand dropped back to his side. She opened her mouth to speak, then cleared her throat and tried again. “Good night, Quinn.”
    â€œGood night, Sophie. I’ll talk to you later.”
    Walking out of there was hard.
He
was hard, and his blood pressure was taking forever to normalize. His skin was so hot, even the muggy night felt cool. On the street outside her place, out of sight of the windows, he stopped and ran a hand over his face, trying to shake off the effects of that kiss.
    It didn’t quite work.

Chapter Five
    Crimney. That boy can kiss.
    That one thought kept barging in to Sophie’s thoughts, no matter how much she tried to focus on anything other than that kiss.
    It wasn’t like unpacking boxes was much of a mental activity to begin with, but unwrapping knickknacks and putting books on shelves and dishes in cupboards weren’t exactly distracting. Washing, drying, and folding dozens of sheets and towels was even worse for allowing mental wanderings. She could try to work on some paperwork, maybe pay some bills, but that wasn’t a project she wanted to do when there was so little a chance she’d actually concentrate on it and not make a complete muck of the bookkeeping.
    She went to go hang shower curtains in the bathrooms instead.
    It was almost embarrassing, the way she’d come
this close
to ripping Quinn’s clothes off and climbing him like a tree. And while she could make excuses for herself, the truth was—only admitted privately here to the tiles of the bathroom of room three—that she wanted Quinn.
    She’d had a few dates in the last eight months—none since she got here, of course, but she hadn’t had the time or the inclination—so it wasn’t like Quinn was some kind of rebound guy or that she was just desperate or something. The dates she’d gone on in Boston after her divorce had been with perfectly nice, very handsome men, but none of them had pushed her to the edge like
that.
Especially not with just a kiss.
    It might be a little frightening if she could get her libido under control long enough to consider anything other than how good Quinn was with his hands and mouth and how those hands and that mouth would feel on
other
parts of her body.
    It was disturbing, but not in a bad way.
    And it wasn’t
just
her hormones talking. Quinn was nice, genuinely so, a perfect example of a southern gentlemen without any good ol’ boy nonsense. He made her feel comfortable in his company, and there was something just stable and earnest about him . . . It was hard to describe, but it was there.
    And then there was that kiss . . .
Damn.
    Had she really basically told him not to call her until Tuesday? Granted, she’d said that
before
he’d kissed her, but Tuesday seemed a hell of a long time away now.
    Patience
, she counseled herself. Now was not necessarily the best time to rush headlong into something. It wasn’t just that she needed to focus on getting this place open—which she did—but she had to put herself back into the small-town mindset. She needed people to like and respect her—not just for the sake of her business’s success, but also for her own long-term happiness living here. Making herself the center of gossip over an affair with Quinn wasn’t a good idea, regardless of how on-board her libido might be.
    Which meant she should probably quit counting down to Tuesday and think more about throttling back on the whole thing, concentrate solely on getting both herself and the business settled and running smoothly before even considering moving anything with Quinn forward at all.
    But then she thought about that kiss again, and the tingle spread across her skin like goose bumps rising on a chilly day.
    The right and rational thing to do was fighting a tough battle against basic, biological, and chemical urges.
    It was