His fingers were moving faster now, truly doing what I knew he ached to do with the other part of his body, stiff and long against my thigh.
But Ronan Black was true to his word. He wanted one thing from me and one thing only:
“Come for me, Ari.”
I shattered. “Ronan!”
My cry was swallowed by a kiss that might have lasted seconds or hours. I really couldn’t tell. All I knew was ecstasy moved through me in waves that matched his fingers as they massaged every last drop of pleasure from my body.
When I finally returned to my proper dimension, I could just make out his face in the dark, right along with the satisfaction written all over it.
“Fucking beautiful.” He leaned down to press one final, gentle kiss on my mouth. “That’s one.”
“You’re ridiculous,” I mumbled. I could barely talk, but I was supposed to withstand seven of those per week? Right now, I felt wrecked for life, and that had just been with his hands.
I was starting to think that our one night together (I wasn’t counting Vegas, since I couldn’t remember any of it) was a very small representation of what Ronan Black was capable of.
“Come here,” he said, rolling onto his back and urging me into the crook of his arm. “We’re falling asleep properly like husband and wife.”
“What does that mean?” I wondered, though I was already draping one leg over his and nuzzling into that warm space that seemed to fit me perfectly.
“I don’t know. It just seems wrong adjourning to other sides of the bed like strangers when you just fell apart in my arms.”
I couldn’t argue with him there, and so I allowed him to arrange me against his long body, draping one of my legs across his lap, pulling one of my arms over his torso so that I was all but splayed across him like a personal blanket.
“I’ve wanted this for weeks,” he murmured as he finally started to relax into the pillow.
“Sex? You didn’t even get off.”
“No, Ari.” His voice was drowsy even as his arm tightened around my shoulders. “To fall asleep with you in my arms.”
24
BLACK SHEEP WHO?
RONAN
It was a beautiful day in Boston. The sun was shining, the trees were billowing green across the Common, and the summer air was so bright and crisp that you could probably hear the crack of the bat at Fenway if you stepped outside.
I didn’t notice a damn thing as I sat in the fourth of an interminable number of meetings that seemed to fall under the job description of Presumptive Interim CEO.
Whatever the fuck that was.
Today was my first day of training to take over the official “helm” of Blackguard Holding. Brendan and Simone were heading back to the farm after his retirement celebration, and while Dad had decided (against his doctors’ orders, of course) that he was spry enough to work today as an ongoing part of his “mentorship” (translation: making sure his remaining children didn’t fuck up his company). I was supposed to be learning how to be the man in charge until that position was made official.
But all I could see, all I could think about, was Laney.
Laney in that simple gray dress. Laney as she watched me across the room at the museum. Laney falling to pieces on myhand while I whispered filthy things to her in the night, then slipped my fingers into my mouth after, eager for the taste. A promise of so much more.
And yet, there was a problem. It wasn’t a matter of things going wrong. It was more the sneaking suspicion that they were going too right.
She felt too good in my bed. Less than twenty-four hours in Boston, and she felt too good in my life.
I’d gone into this with the assumption that it was going to end, eventually. Yes, she thought we were “giving it a try,” but I knew myself. I’d fuck things up because that’s the piece of shit I was. Now it was becoming increasingly evident that doing that was going to screw me up more than ever. And I was starting to wonder if I could handle it.
Not the greatest headspace to be in when I was supposed to be proving to my family and a lot of old rich men that I was competent, reliable, and steady—basically all the things I’d done my best not to be for thirty-five years.
“—which brings us to the quarterly profit analysis,” Liza Kelly was saying from the far end of the table, where she was reviewing the numbers across the company’s different sectors. A PowerPoint was projected on the screen behind her, and I had a brief flashback to my tenth-grade math teacher, who had taken my virginity in my dorm room.
