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I forgot the umbrella.
I remembered a backup battery charger, lipstick, condoms, my passport, a disposable toothbrush, and an appropriate amount of petty cash in case of emergency. I spent hours perfecting my hair and makeup into a look that proclaimed the perfect blend of sexual and social experience. I researched my route and destination and reviewed my notes for the plan.
I was prepared for every single contingency—except the most obvious one, which is that it rains in England sometimes.
Okay, a lot of times. It rains in England a lot of times.
And I forgot the damn umbrella in my hotel room.
I squint up at the street sign on the building next to me and then back down to my phone, trying to get my bearings. Unfortunately, the rain has made it nearly impossible to view the app on my screen, and even more unfortunately, I’m certain I’ve never come across this street in all my planning and preparation, which means I’m definitely lost—although it’s hard to tell, given how London streets rename themselves at bafflingly random intervals.
And it’s while I’m standing there trying to rub my rain-spattered screen on my equally rain-spattered dress that the silver drizzle decides to become a downpour, darkening the already dim evening and soaking through my dress and hair in a matter of seconds.
“Shit!” I mutter, cupping a hand over my eyes, trying to peer through the chilling curtain of rain. I can’t even see across the street, much less try to get my bearings.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
A black cab hisses by, sending a wave of water up and over my only pair of high heels—bought specially for tonight and the plan—and it’s the last straw. Screw getting my bearings. I want to get dry. I start walking, heels squelch-squelching as I go, and in a fit of pique, I yank them off my feet and start jogging barefoot down the slick sidewalk, wondering how my perfectly orchestrated agenda got so off-kilter.
When my father arranged for me to spend the summer with an old friend of his as a research assistant, I was beyond excited. An entire summer in the English countryside cataloging old books and annotating metadata? Basically paradise for me.
But my real excitement came when I realized I’d have a night alone in London before I went to Professor Graeme’s house. A single night in one of the best cities in the world to fix a very serious problem of mine:
I, Zandy Lynch, twenty-two years old and soon-to-be-graduate student, am a virgin. And that is no longer acceptable.
I’m tired of ending my nights with a skinny margarita and a vibrator. I’m tired of dates that go nowhere, tired of coming home alone, tired of lying in bed with a hollow ache that no amount of battery power can massage away. And it was as I was poring over my acceptance letter for library school that I realized I’ve become that silly old stereotype: the spinster librarian. The virgin nerd.
Ugh.
It’s not fair. I never asked to be a virgin at twenty-two! I never asked to be a spinster! All I ever asked for was a cute guy with a willing penis.
Okay, well, and a college education—preferably graduate level or higher.
And a good job—preferably in academia or a related field.
And an extensive shared list of common interests—including, but not limited to, modern literature, premodern literature, postmodern literature, Tolkien marginalia, crossword puzzles, animals, coffee, travel to places where druids sacrificed virgins, and variations of fruit pie.
So maybe my standards were a little high.
I started the plan the way I start everything—with a trip to the library. I outlined my objectives, decided on my research methodology, and created a timeline. I devoured books, articles, studies, and anecdotal data about how to get over my hymen-hurdle, and after all that, I came to a very certain conclusion.
I’d been going about this all wrong.
Sex is supposed to be spontaneous, unforced, mutually initiated. I can’t plan my way into someone’s pants…but I can plan the perfect environment to facilitate depantsing. So when Dad surprised me with the research vacation, I knew this night in London was my chance to find the perfect depantsing environment.
Except now it’s raining and I’m lost and barefoot and the plan has quickly unraveled into a wet, chilly disaster.
Okay, Zandy, focus.
There was a tube station marked on my phone’s map before the water made it totally impossible to navigate—maybe it’s just past the next cross street? I’ll duck inside, out of the rain, get my phone working again, and think of my next steps. And check my makeup.
I only have tonight, after all, and I’m not ready to give up, umbrella or not.
I pick up my jog, my head bent down to shield my eyes from the worst of the rain, the sopping-wet hem of my dress slapping and sticking around my thighs, when I collide with a firm chest and wheeze out an oof. Something resembling a grunt comes from the chest.
From him.
Warm hands come up to my elbows to steady me, and I look up into a pale face marked
by darkly slashed eyebrows, high cheekbones, and a squared, clean-shaven jaw. His eyes in the rainy night seem like every kind of color, light and dark, brown and blue and green, and they’re framed by the longest, sultriest lashes I’ve ever seen on a man.
But it’s his mouth that fascinates me—slightly too wide and slightly too thin but hauntingly pretty, with perfectly formed peaks at his upper lip and a tantalizing hint of fullness to his lower one. Rain drips from his cheeks and the longish ends of his dark hair to catch along the sharp edges of his lips and gather in the tempting bow of his philtrum.
And with a sudden illicit thrill, I realize I want to lick the rainwater off those lips. I want to kiss them until they’re warm and soft under my own. I want to feel the shape of his mouth under mine, murmuring my name—except…
That perfect, rain-slicked mouth is currently creased in a harsh, unhappy scowl.
She’s shivering.
It takes me a moment to notice, as I’m still processing how someone emerged out of this tempest right in front of me. I’m also still processing how this someone in question is a creature made of pale skin, dark hair, and a sinfully red and lush mouth. Like a vampiress straight from a storybook but with the most incongruously innocent eyes I’ve ever seen.
She’s also young, drenched to the bone, and utterly, utterly inappropriately dressed for a night like this.
“Why aren’t you wearing a coat?” I demand over the roar of the rain, and her gaze blinks up at me—which is when I realize she’s been staring at my mouth. A kick of heat goes straight to my cock.
I ignore it.
“And why are you barefoot?”
Her eyes flick back to my frowning mouth, and her own mouth parts ever so slightly, as if my bad-tempered scowl fascinates her. Her tongue darts over her lower lip, licking away a bead of rainwater that settled over her fire-engine-red lipstick, and I find I want her to do it again. And again. And again.
I could watch her licking rain off her lips for the rest of my life.
“I’m looking for the Goose and Gander,” she finally offers. It’s hard to hear her over the rain, and yet even with the whoosh and churr of the torrent, I can hear her accent. Broad and wide and a little flat, American television style.
I know where the Goose and Gander is. I just came from there, actually, having endured a meal deconstructed into various mason jars and served on a wooden plank for the sake of seeing some old friends. But I’d drawn the line at overpriced cocktails decanted into chemistry beakers and opted to go back to my hotel instead.
Which is where I want to be—in my dry bed, with dry clothes and dry blankets and a dry book—not in the drenching rain with a barefoot little American. No matter how red her lips are. Or how enticingly her wet dress clings to her frame.
I scowl again.
“It’s back that way,” I say, pointing behind me. “Just around the corner.”
“What?” she asks, clearly unable to hear me.
“It’s back that— Oh, fuck it,” I mutter, taking her by the elbow and yanking her into the deep doorway of a closed shop. The absence of the rain is almost as shocking as the presence of it, although it still rushes down next to us in a dull, silver roar.
“It’s just past the corner there,” I say again, and in the sheltered cove of the doorway, she can finally hear my words. “Left at the lights, then just a street down.”
“Oh, good,” she says, looking genuinely pleased. And also genuinely cold. Goosebumps pebble her bare arms and chest, and I make a valiant effort not to notice her nipples bunched tight under her dress.
A very valiant effort.
I fail, of course.
Her teeth chatter as she says, “Th-Thank you! My phone wouldn’t work in the rain, and I thought I memorized the way, but it all looked different once I actually got here, and then the rain made it so hard to see—” Her own shivers break apart her words, and for some reason this makes me unaccountably annoyed.
“Here,” I say gruffly, shrugging out of my jacket and putting it over her shoulders. She’s flapping a hand in protest, but her hand stills as soon as the dry, warm interior of the jacket touches her shoulders. She practically folds herself into the jacket then, doing this thing where she rubs her cheek against the collar, and I know it’s to get dry—I know that—but fuck if it doesn’t look like she’s nuzzling into it. Like a kitten against the warm palm of its owner.
“Thank you,” says the girl, her eyes wide pools of deep blue. I notice with a strange curl of satisfaction that she’s not shivering as hard now.
“Why don’t you have a jacket?” I demand again, knowing I sound surly but refusing to care. Everyone else in my life has written me off as a miserable bastard and they ignore me as such—this girl might as well learn too.
At that, her mouth forms into a defensive little moue. “It’s June,” she says. “I shouldn’t need a jacket in June.”
I stare at her like she’s insane, which maybe she is.
“And the bare feet?”
“My feet got wet,” she says, as if this is an entirely adequate explanation. “I didn’t like it.”
“You realize they’ve gotten even wetter without shoes.”
“It’s better this way,” she insists, waving her shoes at me. Once I see them, I have to agree. I don’t see how anyone could walk in those across the width of the shoe shop, much less along slippery, uneven pavement.
“I hope whoever you’re meeting sends you home in a taxi,” I mutter.
“Oh, I’m not meeting anyone,” she says.
“What?”
She reaches up to brush a wet strand of hair off her cheek, but I beat her to it. I don’t know why, but it’s instinctive, like breathing, like blinking. Touching her.
My fingertips linger on her cheek after I brush the hair aside, and she stares up at me with something too close to trust. I drop my hand.
“I only have one night in London,” she says, all that trust and big-eyed nuzzling replaced by something matter-of-fact and utterly practical. “And I spent days researching where to go for a drink tonight. It had to be within walking distance of my hotel, it had to have several five-star reviews on multiple restaurant rating sites, and it had to be established enough to have regulars but new enough to be trendy. The Goose and Gander met all of those requirements.”
Well, that’s where research will get you. An obnoxious hipster cave of Edison bulbs and reclaimed wood.
“And why that specific criteria?” I ask, but I’m already peering back out into the rain, wondering if it’s let up enough that I can send this crazy, shivering girl on her way. Get back to my night. My night in a dry bed with my book, alone.
Somehow it doesn’t sound as appetizing as it did just a few minutes ago.
“Oh,” she chirps, like she’s pleased I asked. “I wanted to find a man to sleep with.”
It takes a moment for her words to unfold in my brain, and I’m still staring at the rain when her meaning becomes clear. An unpleasant bolt of something hits me with a muffled thud.
My head swivels slowly back so I can look at her. “Excuse me?”
Her face is animated now, all red lips and high brows and dark lashes in the shadowed, rainy night. “Well, I have a plan, and I think it’s a very good plan, but unfortunately my circumstances are narrowed to this one night in particular—”
“A plan.”
She nods, that pleased look again, like I’m her star pupil.
Fuck that. I’m the professor here, and I have the sudden urge to tell her so. To press her against the wall and put my lips to her ear and murmur all the ways she’ll respect my authority and experience.
My cock responds to the image, straining full and heavy at the thought of touching her. Teaching her. Punishing her.
“You see,” she says, totally oblivious to the deviant lust pounding through me, “I really need a man with a willing penis—or I suppose I should say a willing man with a penis, but when I say it like that, it sounds very dismissive of non— You’re scowling again.”
She’s right. “So what you’re saying is that you have a plan to go to a place you’ve never
been, in a city you’ve never visited, to find a man you’ve never met to fuck you?” My voice is frigid, bordering on cruel, and I see her blanch.
“That’s very judgmental,” she scolds, but I’m not to be scolded. Not right now, because I do the scolding, I make the rules, and the sooner she learns that—
Wait, no, what am I thinking? She’s not going to learn anything from me. I’m not going to teach her anything. I’m not even going to spend another ten minutes with this deranged, bedraggled girl.
Even if she has the kind of long, thick hair that begs to be wrapped around a fist. Even if she has a rain-chilled body just crying to be loved warm again.
Even if she has the kind of plush red lips designed to drive men mad.
But I’ve been down this road before, and I know what lies at the other end of it. Bitter memories and a life left in pieces.
Never again.
“I’m judgmental because it’s an idiotic idea,” I reply in a sharp voice. “Do you have any idea how unsafe that is? How foolish?”
Even in the dark, I see how heat glints in her eyes, and she sticks a finger in my chest as if she’s about to deliver me a scathing lecture. As she does, her arm leaves the warm confines of my jacket and reveals a delicate wrist circled with a thin band of leather.
A watch.
I don’t know why that’s the thing that does it, but something shears off inside my mind, sending my control bumping and careening off the tracks.
“Where’s your hotel?” I ask before she can start in on whatever she was about to say.
Her brows pull together and her mouth closes. Opens again. “Why?” she asks suspiciously.
“Because I’m taking you back there.”
“Why?” she asks, genuinely confused now.
“Because there’s no way in hell I’m letting you prance off to a bar to find some stranger to fuck you,” I say. And I give her a brief once-over, my eyes tracing where the fabric of her dress clings to her breasts and her soft belly and her achingly shaped hips. There are no secrets
through that wet fabric, and those shockingly abundant curves are on clear display for anyone with eyes. For the undoubtedly many willing penises back at the pub.
The thought makes my chest tighten with something uncivilized and jealous.
“Especially not looking like that,” I add.
Her cheeks flush dark enough that it’s visible even in the night shadows, and I realize too late she thinks I’m mocking her, not warning her.
Fine. So be it. If that’s what it takes to save her from the greedy arseholes at the Goose and Gander, then I’ll pay the price. “What hotel?” I repeat.
She worries her bottom lip between her teeth, and that simple act has my erection throbbing against the damp fabric of my trousers, begging to be let free, begging out to play. And oh, how it could play along the soft lines of her mouth and over the wet pink of her tongue. How rude and rough it would look against the overflowing handfuls of her tits…
“The Douglass,” she says finally.
“I’m staying at the Douglass too,” I say before I can stop myself, and then horror curls through my chest.
She’s too close.
Too real.
Too…possible.
Would it be so bad? a tiny voice whispers in my mind. Just one night with a girl you’ll never see again?
Yes, goddammit. Yes, it would.
Meanwhile, the girl seems to be having some sort of insight. Some sort of wild epiphany. “You,” she says slowly.
“What?”
“You!” Her entire face lights up. “You could be the one!”
I stare at her. “You’re joking.”
She’s too excited to catch on to the rhetorical nature of my statement, already bouncing on the balls of her feet. She’s so short that even on her tiptoes, the top of her head barely clears my chin. “I’m not joking! It’s perfect, don’t you see? We’re even staying at the same hotel! You can have sex with me and then just go right back to your room!” She beams up at me, as if expecting some kind of approbation for working out this problem of hers.
“You cannot be serious,” I say in something very close to a stammer, which pisses me off. I’m not uncertain, I know how I feel about everything always, and I know how I feel about this: the girl is mad and I’m
leaving.
“I am serious,” she says, brow furrowed, as if puzzled as to why that would even occur to me. “I would just like to have sex with someone tonight, and you’re handsome and you’re here.”
And that’s when I realize she’s not mad. She’s something much, much worse—she’s innocent. And willing.
I turn to go, and she catches my arm, her little watch flashing in the shimmering glow of the streetlights. A stupid little watch that I bet she puts on every morning so she won’t be late for whatever burlesque antics she has devised for that day. I bet she’s on time for everything. I bet she’s early to every class or meeting or shift, sitting with a straight back and with a pencil caught between her teeth, a spare pencil speared through a bun of soft, glossy hair…
Fuck.
I pull free of her arm. “Keep the jacket,” I mutter, ducking back into the rain and away from this creature who seems to be built out of my most shameful temptations, every inch of me protesting at the distance between us, at pulling away from her.
But there’s no other way. For the sake of her soul and mine, I should stay far away from her and her little watch and her wanton body with its big, soft curves and needy nipples.
The chilly rain sluicing down is a relief, soaking me straight through without my jacket and quelling the heat inside my blood just enough so I can think again. So I can remember the life I built, free of temptation, free of chaos, free of sin.
I take a deep, rainy breath. It’s going to be okay. I was tested and came up with full marks. And now to my reward, which is a chaos-free night. Alone.
Fuck, what cold comfort. Comfort even colder than the rain soaking me through.
But the cost of giving in to my urges would make my life even colder still.
“You’re not married, are you?” a voice comes from beside me.
I look over at the girl following me. She peers closely at me through the rain. “Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”
“I’m not married, and I’m not seeing anyone. Not that it matters.”
I try to walk faster, shoving my hands in my pockets and ducking my head from the rain, but she keeps up, nearly jogging now. My jacket hangs
open enough that I can see what effect jogging has on the glistening rounds of her breasts peeking up over her bodice.
Christ.
“I’m not either,” she says. “Married or dating, that is.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you think I’m pretty enough to have sex with?” she says, her voice growing louder as a bus sloshes by.
“What?”
“I mean, if you’re not attracted to me, I totally understand.” She hops over a puddle in an expedient, unself-conscious move that almost makes me smile.
“Most men aren’t attracted to me. That’s why I had to come all the way to London to…” She trails off, clutching the jacket tighter around her. “Anyway,” she continues in a defeated voice. “I’d understand if you weren’t.”
The lonely note in her voice draws me up short, even though the safety of our hotel shimmers mirage-sweet just across the road.
I turn to her in the rain. “You think I’m not attracted to you?”
“Well, most guys—”
“I’m not most guys,” I growl, and her lower lip goes between her teeth again. But not in fear like it should.
In interest. In desire.
She’s too innocent by far.
“You think men don’t want you?” I ask in a low voice, taking a step forward. She watches me with an eager trepidation, and it makes me harder than I thought possible. “Everything about your body reminds a man of fucking. Your tits, your mouth, those ridiculous hips. Even those big blue eyes of yours make a man wonder what they’d look like peering up at him with you on your knees. Looking at him from over your shoulder as he bends you over his desk.” I stop abruptly, my words getting too personal, too tailored to my own fucked-up needs.
She releases that lower lip, and I’m nearly undone by how open she looks, how vulnerable. I want to sweep her into my arms and cover all that vulnerability with my body—protect her from the world even as I refuse to protect her from myself.
Get a fucking grip, Oliver.
This can’t happen.
But what if it could? I won’t ever have to see this girl again. She’s not my student.
She’s not Rosie, the little voice reminds me. She can’t hurt you.
“Well, then it’s simple,” the girl says, as if she can read my thoughts. “If you’re attracted to my body and you’re unattached—”
“It’s complicated,” I say, pushing past her to splash my way to the hotel. She has no idea how complicated.
She has no idea how wrong.
Like before, she follows me. “Please. I promise I’m not crazy. I’m just tired of—” She stops, seems to change her words. “Tired of not having sex. Please.”
“It’s for your own good,” I mutter, even though my entire body is swirling with the need to give her what’s actually for her own good, which is her over my lap, legs kicking adorably, as I redden her ass with my palm.
I’m so hard now. Hard enough that it must be obvious. Hard enough to be past caring. Hard enough that the minute I slip inside my hotel room, I’m going to have a hand braced on the door while my other fists my cock.
“How do you know what’s for my own good?” the girl asks, and it’s the way she asks that makes my steps falter. She doesn’t demand it like most women would, and she doesn’t deny that I might. That I might know what’s for her own good and that I might know it well enough to tell her.
No.
No.
“We’re not doing this,” I tell her as we reach the doors of the Douglass, and I recognize how ridiculous it is that I’m holding the door open for this woman even as I’m trying to push her away. “You’re just going to have to trust me.”
She steps inside, and it’s so bright that my eyes take a moment to adjust. When they do, I see that she’s shoving my jacket at me.
“Here. Thank you for this, and take it back. And for the record, I don’t trust you, and why should I? I’m a grown woman and I don’t know you—and also I’ve done a lot of research about sex, so I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about.”
She’s gesturing now, the hand still clutching her shoes waving them around, but I’m not watching the shoes, I’m watching her—the almost embarrassingly generous curves of her. Not embarrassing because of the generosity
but because of the near-wantonness of them. The illicit thoughts those curves conjure even fully clothed as she is.
Of course, fully clothed is a misleading term at the moment, because yes, that little waist and those lavish tits and hips are covered with fabric, but the wet dress clings to every contour and swerve of her body. I can even make out the gentle dip of her navel, the place where her thighs meet her body. The sweet bullets of her nipples.
Even the rest of her body is wanton: the long arch of her neck, still slicked with rain, the exposed square of her shoulders, the long wet hair that waves in dark webs down her back and over the elegant line of her collarbone.
Even her innocent anger feels tempting. Even the cocoon of inexperience around her drives me crazy.
Even that goddamn watch is irresistible.
I take my jacket and start walking to the lift. I have to put some space between us or my skin’s going to catch on fire.
“Please?” she asks one last time. “Please?”
“No.” I’m almost to the lift doors now, I’m almost safe.
Or rather, she’s almost safe.
“Then I’m going to the Goose and Gander,” she says, frustrated. “Or anywhere. But I’m not giving up, not when I only have one night here.”
I’ve already hit the button for the lift by the time she’s uttered the words, but it’s not too late to spin around and glare at her. “What did you just say?” I ask in a low voice.
She’s already turning around, and I realize with some mixture of fury, horror, and lust that she means it. She’s going to go back out into that gale. To find another man.
My hand finds her elbow, and I pull her into me with a growl. “You’re not going anywhere.”
She gives me a glare as turbulently aroused as my own, pressing her wet curves against me in something between a challenge and a request.
“What exactly are you going to do about it?” she dares.
My cock is a hot bar of steel between us, fussing at the seam of my trousers, and I can’t help but press it into her belly. And my mouth is dry, so fucking dry, with wanting her. “Girls who disobey get punished,” I warn.
“By you?”
“By me.”
Suddenly, I find that I’m not holding her to me so much as she’s holding herself to me, her high heels dropping to the floor in a dull clatter as her fingers find the flats of my chest under my thin sweater.
“Punishing bad girls… Is this you being kinky or a serial killer?” she asks, that red mouth curved in what could only be called impertinence.
I can barely breathe. And I can’t even fathom saying the word kinky like she’s just said it, like she would say tall or English. Like it’s nothing. Like it’s no big deal.
Like she might want it.
All I choke out is a husky, “I’m not a killer.”
She has no reason to believe me, no reason to believe that I’m safe, which is exactly why I didn’t want her trawling for strange men in the middle of London.
And all thoughts sizzle and melt away in a searing instant because she’s hooked her arms behind my neck and pulled herself up to my mouth.
Because she’s kissing me with red, rain-spattered lips.
And I am done for.
He tastes like mint.
Not toothpaste mint, but fresh mint, straight from the garden, herbal and with the tiniest bit of cold sting. I moan the minute I taste it, the minute our tongues slide together, and his answering moan has me throwing all lingering doubts onto the floor along with my dumb shoes.
I don’t care that I don’t know him. I don’t care that he’s not the plan. I want it to be him. Him with his testy refusals. Him with his dark threats. Him with those hypnotic eyes that are every color and that mouth shaped somewhere between elegance and cruelty.
His hands are spread big and possessive on my back now, keeping me so tight against him that I can feel every flat, hard plane of his chest and stomach. I can feel the heavy ridge in his pants that tells me how much he meant his words from earlier in the rain.
Everything about your body reminds a man of fucking.
It’s the first time I’ve ever thought of my body that way—of sexy instead of heavy, of desirable instead of softly messy. And I like it. I like how his eyes burned over my curves, as if he were already planning things that would take him straight to hell.
I want it to be him.
And almost like he reads my mind, he turns us and starts walking me backward into the elevator, pausing only to duck down and grab my shoes. Once we go through the elevator doors, he reaches for my thighs and lifts me up as if I weigh nothing, still kissing me with those soft, minty lips all the while.
Well, not kiss, really. Devour is more like it, as if he hasn’t kissed a woman in years—as if he hasn’t even touched anyone in years. He seems that hungry for it. But new to sex as I am, I know you don’t kiss like him without vast experience, so surely he’s not that hard up for it? Surely someone like him, handsome and mysterious and captivating, has someone in his bed every night?
Funny how the observation makes me jealous, given that I don’t even know him. I don’t even know his name. But even as I’m jealous of all the experience belied by his capable handling of me, I’m also grateful for it.
Grateful for the easy, knowledgeable way his hands work my body, pinning me between his leanly muscled frame and the wall of the elevator.
Grateful for the expert way he matches our bodies together, sliding me so that my lace-covered pussy grinds over the thick part of him that throbs for me.
Grateful for the smooth way he deepens our kiss, exploring my mouth, biting at my lips and my jaw, and leaving me a wriggling, wet mess.
“Which floor?” he growls into my mouth.
“Wh-What?”
“We’re doing this in your room,” he says, and it was always my plan to bring someone to my room for safety reasons, so I tell him.
“Nine.”
He slams a fist against the wall of buttons, and then he’s back to plundering my mouth, not so much coaxing me open as taking what he wants, and God, it’s like nothing I ever could have dreamed. I’ve known lust myself. I’ve known what it feels like to have my body aching with the need for friction and fullness, but I’ve never, ever imagined this. The rush of power and pure biological frenzy of feeling someone else’s lust. The way it threads through my own desire like a hot copper wire. The way it makes me want more, more, more.
And more.
I have almost no control over myself in this moment, grinding my needy core against him, rubbing my breasts against his chest, yanking everywhere at his sweater and his firm arms and shoulders and at the wet lengths of his hair—too short to be long but too long to be anything other than unkempt.
He lets me pluck and paw at him, and it seems to drive him madder and madder—his kisses growing more savage, his grip more merciless, until the elevator doors open and he drops me to my feet, yanking me into the hallway before I can find my balance.
“Nine thirteen,” I manage, fumbling with my purse for my phone as I’m pulled down the hallway and then surfacing with it right before I’m crushed against my door and kissed within an inch of my life.
“Take a picture of me,” he says breathlessly against my lips.
“I— What?”
He pulls back just enough so I can see he’s serious. Those blue-green-brown eyes swirl with something stormy and pained. “Take a picture of me and send it to someone you trust.” And then he rattles off a string of numbers. His birthday.
“Why?” I ask again, even though I suspect why.
“Surely,” he says, raising one warm hand to grip my jaw and hold me close for another hard kiss, “with all your research, you know why.”
“So someone knows I’m with you.”
“So you’ll be safe,” he corrects gently, nipping at my neck and then meeting my gaze. “I don’t know if I can ever forgive you for being so careless with yourself.”
I laugh—half from his bossy words and half from the new flicker of his tongue along the shell of my ear. “My body is my own to be
careless with.”
“Not tonight, it isn’t,” he whispers. “Tonight it’s mine.”
I text his picture to a friend of mine, along with his birthday and name—Oliver Markham—and then I use the hotel app on my phone to unlock the door.
“What’s your name?” he asks as we kiss our way into the room. I left a light on when I went out earlier, so I reach to turn it off because sex happens in the dark, I know that much, but he catches my wrist before I can do it. “Lights stay on,” he rasps. “And I want your name. I told you mine.”
That he did, and hell if Oliver Markham doesn’t sound so fancy and English-y that I can hardly stand it. Suddenly I’m embarrassed of my own name, which seems to make me all the younger than the ten years I now know separate us.
“Amanda,” I say, telling him my real name. No one calls me that—I’ve been Zandy since basically the moment I was born—but I file taxes as Amanda, and it does sound a lot more grown-up. Like the kind of name an Oliver would be paired with.
Oliver and Amanda sounds perfect.
Oliver and Zandy sounds like a joke.
“Amanda,” he murmurs as his hands cup my face, his thumbs tracing soft lines along the rises of my cheekbones. “What do you want tonight?”
“I want you to have sex with me.”
And that’s all he needs.
His hands drop to my skirt, and they ruck up the wet fabric easily, hitching it all to my waist, and then he cups my pussy with one elegant hand. “You need to be fucked here? Hmm?”
“Yes,” I sigh, trying to press into his hand. It feels so good, so fucking good, and I’ve never gotten this far…never had only a scrap of lace between my aching emptiness and a man’s possessive touch.
But then his touch leaves my pussy, and I whimper. He reaches for the zipper of my dress and, with a practiced move, tugs it down. Before I can fully process what’s happening, I’m bared to the waist, with only the thin silk of my bra between my body’s secrets and his hungry eyes.
“But these need me too, don’t they?” he says, his hands smoothing over the rounds of my breasts, shaping to their weight and ample size. Despite the cold and sharp cast of his mouth and the equally cold and aristocratic cut of his features, there’s something almost boyish in his gaze as he cups and fondles me. Something awed and greedy. He slides the straps of my bra over my shoulders and then peels
the damp silk cups from my skin.
“Christ,” he mutters to himself as my nipples peek free and my breasts spill over the rest of the cups. “Jesus Christ.”
And before I can say anything or even cover myself, like my instincts demand, his mouth is closing warm and wet over the needy tip of one breast, and I let out a noise that’s nearly embarrassing in its shocked honesty. It’s not the rehearsed coo of a woman in a porn video—it’s a noise that comes straight from my belly, a low moan of unfiltered need.
I had no idea it could feel so good.
No idea.
His mouth is slick and warm, sucking every secret dirty wish of mine right to the surface of my skin as he works me and worries my nipple with rough nips and pulls.
I feel the wet response between my legs like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I mean, wet after a few minutes with battery power, sure, but wet from a stranger’s mouth moving hungrily over my breasts? ...
