Earth Bound by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner Page A

consider the weight of him, the textures and planes of his body, hard against her when they’d finished. All she’d wanted in that moment was to burrow into him and stay all night. Warm and sated.
    Which had been why she’d bolted as fast as she could, hauling her clothes on and her façade back into place.
    He wanted her body— that had been obvious. But he also wanted the boundary between who they were here and what they did there. She wanted to show him she understood, that she could respect it, that she needed it too.
    She stepped out of her shoes and balled her toes against the linoleum floor. She knew two things: First, she was going to overcome this, to learn how to keep it locked away. She was going to figure out how to sit in a room with him and not think of his fingers on her thighs. Because, second, she wasn’t going to stop meeting him in hotel rooms. The desperation, the intensity, the near violence with which she’d found pleasure with him—no, she wasn’t about to give those things up after having found them.
    All she needed was to blot out his hands. Then she could be in a room with him, cold as marble like she was supposed to be.

C HAPTER E IGHT

    February 1962

    Parsons opened his eyes and stared at the bedside clock.
    4:31 a.m. and he awoke without the alarm going off, as he did every morning. You could take the boy off the farm, but not the farm out of the boy.
    The morning was winter dark and chilled; the sun wouldn’t appear for another few hours. Being awake at 4:30 in February was always a special kind of misery.
    He gave a sharp glance to the empty half of the bed before rolling onto his back, tossing his arm over his forehead. Before he’d begun this… thing with Charlie, he’d slept in the very middle of his bed. It was his damn bed, he didn’t have to share it—why shouldn’t he take up all of it?
    She’d never once been in his bed—never would be—but ever since their first assignation all those months ago, he’d slowly inched over to one side in his sleep, making space. And he’d stayed there. They didn’t even fall asleep together in the hotel, so he didn’t know what his strange sleep patterns were all about.
    If he was going to think about her, there were better choices to linger on than why he was sleeping funny. He’d rather remember how she’d looked last week in a sheath dress and heels, a strand of turquoise beads around her slim neck, at the blackboard as she worked out a calculation. She’d taken her lip between her teeth as she’d pondered, eyes narrowed as she attacked the problem.  
    But it wasn’t her lip caught in her teeth that had hung in his memory. No, it was when she’d raised a hand to the board, long-fingered, the nails a delicate shade of coral, pressed her fingertips to the surface, and flexed against it.
    It might have been the most erotic thing he’d ever seen, that tiny movement of her hand. If they’d been alone, he might have taken her upper arm, spun her from the board, and dragged them both to the ground. She’d have threaded those fingers through his hair, spreading white through the strands and grinding chalk dust into his scalp as she demanded he kiss her harder, deeper…
    He would, too. He’d drive himself into her, savoring her high, breathy moans as he pushed them both toward—
    His hips lifted from the mattress as he came into his hand.
    He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling, and simply breathed for several moments. There. Now he was ready to face her at work, to keep all his lustful thoughts confined to where they ought to be: here in this bed and in that hotel room.
    He got up, changed the sheets, had a shower, and made his way to the kitchen in his robe. A few shakes of the grape-nuts box into a bowl, a splash of milk, and breakfast was ready. He was halfway through the bowl when the phone rang.
    He picked it up. “Parsons.”
    “Eugene, is that how I taught you to answer the phone?”
    A smile softened his mouth.