3
“Which one’s your favorite?”
She looked up from the shelf of silicone anal beads, warmth creeping up her neck from under the collar of her tee. Des stood just far enough away to maintain propriety, hands in the pockets of his well-tailored slacks. His head was cocked, and his gunmetal gray eyes sparkled with mischief that complemented the smirk on his lips.
“Excuse me?” She kept her voice at its most professional and ignored the answering smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“It’s a perfectly legitimate question.” He removed a hand from his pocket and gestured around the store. “You work in sales. You must have a professional recommendation.”
The smile she’d been fending off pushed through, but she rolled her eyes and resumed stocking the display. “If you gave our products more than a cursory glance, you’d notice the staff recommendation stickers on some of them.” The lingerie rack caught her eye, the colors and styles half-haphazardly mixed up, and she shifted directions to reorganize it.
Des followed. “Au contraire, my dear Camille. I saw Tristan’s recommendation—a leather bondage set. Not surprising. And I saw Lenny’s recommendation—a veiny green thing that was bigger than my forearm.”
He held up said forearm for emphasis, deliciously long sepia-colored fingers curled into a fist at the end. Cami dragged her attention away to the sexy pirate costume that had started to slip from her lax fingers.
“What I didn’t see,” his voice deepened, “was your name on anything.”
She glanced at him, sidelong. There was intrigue in his eyes, in the way he dipped his chin minutely toward his chest, as though to get closer to her eye level. This close, the black line in his left eye was much more obvious.
“Has anybody ever told you you have beautiful eyes?” she asked.
He squinted at her with something akin to suspicion. “Usually I'm just told the coloboma freaks people out.”
She tilted her head, curiosity getting the better of her. “Is that the black line?”
He hummed a confirmation. “It’s a birth defect, but it doesn’t affect my sight.” He rattled it off nonchalantly, like he’d repeated the line verbatim countless times throughout his life.
A thoughtfulhmmescaped her as she studied his eyes. “It’s pretty.”
He arched a brow at her, and the expression had amusement tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Cami,” he said, “you can’t distract me with flattery and feminine wiles.”
“Aw, you think I have feminine wiles?” She’d never been accused of having wiles before, and it was curiously exhilarating. He didn’t answer though, just stared pointedly at her, his coloboma pulling her gaze like a focal line directly to his own.She sighed. “My recommendation is on the candle display by the door.”
For a long moment, he was silent, and she felt the heat of an unwelcome flush begin to creep up her neck toward her cheeks.
“Candles?”
Her chin jerked upward. “They’re lavender-scented. They’re nice in the bath.”
Her body thrummed with embarrassment. It was silly to pick candles as her favorite product in a store that sold sex toys, and it stung that he found her pick on the pedestrian side. Childish, maybe. Unimaginative.
Maybe she was. Maybe that was the problem.
At the edge in her voice, he paused, his body curling in toward her as though to block out the world around them. “Don’t get me wrong, Cami,” he said, his tone more intimate and his smile hesitant. “You in the bath is the best mental image I’ve had all month, but scented candles never gave anybody an orgasm.”
Having worked at Sex on the Beach for the past year, she was sure that wasn’t true, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. She’d never get through the full sentence without spontaneously combusting.
“You shouldn’t say things like that to me,” she chastised, hanging up the sexy pirate costume. “People have been ejected from the store for less than that. Lenny doesn’t like people harassing her staff.”
“Am I harassing you?”
“Yes.” As she darted to the checkout counter, she cast a smile over her shoulder to find an answering smirk on his lips.
He approached the counter as she stepped behind it. The woody, citrus scent of his aftershave filled her lungs and swayed her closer over the barrier between them. With him across from her, his mouth was harder to ignore. He was clean-shaven, not a hint of stubble offered to camouflage the promising curve of hisfull lower lip. A smattering of freckles spilled across the bridge of his nose like brown sugar that escaped the spoon on a trip to a bowl of oatmeal. She wondered if he would taste just as sweet.
He leaned against the glass, elbows braced on it. “Do you want me to stop?”
The thick blonde rope of her ponytail slipped over her shoulder as she cocked her head. “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I may incriminate myself.”
