Single Mom Seeks... by TERESA HILL

I’m very glad about that right now.”
    “I didn’t know what to say to him. I mean, I told him he was crazy if he thought he was bringing teenage girls home for the night—”
    “Good. That’s exactly what you should have said.”
    “But what if I want to start seeing someone? Do I sneak around behind his back? That seems kind of silly, too. I mean, he’s not a child, but he is only fifteen. I’m thirty-eight. Am I supposed to live like a monk or do I get some kind of pass on this?”
    “I don’t know if I’m the person to ask about this,” Lily said. “I really don’t have any experience with this kind of parenting problem. I mean, I guess you could hope to find a woman with no kids and a place of her own and make an early night of it. So Jake isn’t home alone for long.”
    Nick grinned and put his beer down in the grass beside him, then turned to look at her. “Not gonna work. The woman I’ve got my eye on has two little girls.”
    “Oh.” Lily nearly dropped her glass of wine.
    Nick saved her by taking it out of her hand and putting it down in the grass, too. Then he took her chin in his hand, and very slowly, giving her time to pull away if she wanted to, leaned in close, his nose nuzzling hers, lips practically on hers.
    “It’s you, Lily. The woman I want is you.”
     
    Lily might have grabbed him and kissed him then.
    Or he might have grabbed her and kissed her.
    Actually, now that she thought about it, he wasn’t a grabber.
    He was exquisitely gentle and smooth and very, very sure of himself.
    So it must have been her who reached out and wrapped her arms around him and hung on to him for dear life.
    Anything to mean that he kept kissing her the way he was.
    Warm, soft, sexy lips on hers, the heat of him seeping into her bones, his arms so strong and sure around her. Making her feel like it had been about a million years since a man had held her this way, kissed her this way, excited her this way.
    She felt the same way she had when she’d looked out her kitchen window and seen him in the bright sunshine, all gleaming skin and muscles, dark golden hair and dark eyes, sexy as can be and a little bit scary.
    Because it didn’t feel safe to feel this way about him or any man.
    But at the same time, it felt so very good.
    Lily sank into him, opening herself up to him, greedy for the taste and feel of him, like a woman who’d been alone for decades.
    Honestly, that’s how it felt. Decades.
    She clung to him, drinking in those sweet, drugging kisses of his, imagining hands all over her body, clothes stripped off, her welcoming him into her bed.
    If they’d been alone, she feared that was where they’d be in five minutes flat.
    The man’s appeal was that potent. Either that, or she had become the proverbial sex-starved divorced woman, sleeping alone in the suburbs for way too long.
    He started pulling away long before she was satisfied, his arms slowly disentangling himself from her, taking her face in his hands, his lips grinning against hers as she tried to get in one more kiss and then another and another before this was over. Like she absolutely could not get enough of him.
    “Lily, honey.” He laughed. “We can’t do this right now. Believe me, I want to. But we can’t. Jake’s at my house, and your girls on the other side of the yard, and you don’t want them to know anything about this. Remember?”
    Lily laughed, too, because she was so happy. Because she felt alive again, after being half-dead for so long. Because a gorgeous man had moved in next door to her, and he was kind and sweet to her girls and good to his nephew, and right now, he did seem like a present from the universe, delivered right to Lily.
    “Sorry. I…Oh, geez.” She was embarrassed now. Happy, but embarrassed.
    “I know. Believe me, I know,” he said, drawing in a long breath and letting it out slowly. “At least, they have to go to sleep at some point. I don’t guess you’d feel comfortable with me