At Your Most Beautiful Harper Bliss (classic reads .TXT) 📖

Just maybe, Quinn thought, as she nuzzled her lips against the warm skin of Maya’s neck, there had been more between them that night than they had allowed themselves to admit. If the passage of ten years, ten years of life lived to the fullest—at least for Quinn—hadn’t been enough to erase that spark between them, then what ever could?

“I did clearly state earlier that I wasn’t going to seduce you,” Quinn said. “So this is all your doing.”

Maya wrapped her arms around Quinn. “Believe what you want to,” she said. “I’ll always know the truth.”

“Which is?” Quinn asked.

“That you still have the hots for your neighbor, even after all these years.”

Quinn chuckled as she felt Maya’s body convulse with laughter against hers. “I plead guilty to the hundredth degree.” Quinn ran a finger over Maya’s belly. “Are you going to kick me out again in the morning?” Oops. Surely that was the wrong question at the wrong time. Quinn found Maya’s ear. “Forget I asked. It doesn’t matter right now.”

“It’s a fair enough question.” Maya pushed herself away from Quinn a little. She looked her in the eye. “You will have to leave at some point.”

“But not to go back to my parents’ house this time around.”

“You do know I never meant to hurt you, Quinn.” Maya took her hand and pressed a soft kiss to her knuckle. “There was just no other way.”

“I know.” Of course, Quinn knew. “I shouldn’t have brought that up just now. I’m sorry.”

“It must be on your mind. It’s on mine too.” Maya’s voice was soft, unthreatening, and very sexy. “For now, though, why don’t we just let this be what it is.”

“And what is it to you?”

“Two old friends having a gay old time.” Maya’s eyes narrowed as she lifted Quinn’s wrist to her lips and kissed the inside of it.

While it was impossible to ignore the history they had together, Quinn was more than happy to just let things run their course, because her skin was flushing with excitement, and Maya’s kisses weren’t helping to subdue her desire. She pulled Maya close again, her hands getting lost in her luscious mane of hair, as she kissed Maya’s lips. As she pressed her body against Maya’s, against the heat of her skin, Quinn’s knee pushed in between Maya’s legs again, because she couldn’t help herself. Maya drove her a little wild in a way that rarely happened to her. Maybe because part of her felt like she needed to make the most of it—that this, once again, could be over before it had well and truly begun.

Maya pushed until Quinn toppled onto her back so she could let her hands roam across Quinn’s skin. Her fingertips caressed the outside of Quinn’s breast.

Quinn’s nipple hardened with need. She gazed down, at the trajectory of Maya’s hand. She loved watching Maya’s hand, that nimble extension to her ever-graceful arms. Her fingertips circled Quinn’s nipple and Quinn let out a groan. She didn’t know how much more of this she could stand even though Maya had just begun. But that wasn’t entirely correct. They might only have been lying in Maya’s bed for a short while, but the flirting had started last week, and a whole lot of that flirting was rooted in something that had happened years ago.

At times, over the years, Quinn had indulged herself and allowed her mind to wander to thoughts of Maya. She imagined her walking barefoot by the side of the pool. She envisioned her dancing and, while doing so, looking deep into Quinn’s eyes, an inviting smile on her lips. She had even pictured Maya’s hands doing the very thing they were doing now: playing with Quinn, arousing her. Elevating her need for Maya with every flick of her wrist. Though potent enough for Quinn’s goals at the time, those fantasies had been just that. This was the real deal. It was all so unbelievable that Quinn buried her hands in Maya’s hair, dug her own fingertips into the flesh of Maya’s back, to ascertain her realness. But there was no question this was real. Quinn didn’t reach such sharp levels of arousal when she was on her own. She only burned like this under Maya’s touch—and burn she did.

Maya ran her hand over the tattoo on Quinn’s side.

It was always hard to predict how someone would react to the phrases Quinn had chosen to immortalize on her skin, but Maya seemed quite taken with them. When she’d gone on a little discovery tour of her body earlier, and had traced her fingertips over Quinn’s inner thighs, Quinn imagined it wasn’t just her blood pulsing with desire.

Maya’s fingertips meandered to the waistband of Quinn’s panties which, for some reason she couldn’t begin to fathom, she was still wearing. She pushed them down a fraction the way she had done earlier and exposed Quinn’s original tattoo—the one that had enthralled Maya ten years ago. How could ten years pass and not a smidgen of the attraction between them have diminished? At first thought, back then Quinn believed they’d ended up in bed because she’d been audacious enough to flirt with Maya and Maya had been in the right frame of mind to be receptive to it. Tommy had just left home. Quinn had instinctively known how to say the right things. All those years, she had believed that she and Maya sleeping together, the two of them sharing the most incredible night, had been mostly her doing. But, as Maya’s fingers disappeared inside her panties, she felt like she needed to reassess. It had been more than that. In fact, it was quite arrogant for Quinn to believe that the stars had aligned that night merely because she’d taken a fancy to seducing her neighbor. She knew better now. Both of them had played an equal part because both of them felt what had been growing between them over the course of that divine, sun-drenched weekend.