“All right.” Olivia was surprisingly chipper about his noncommittal response, perhaps because she didn’t have to rely on him to deliver the invite to Cami. “Bye, then. Stay out of trouble!”
Des snapped the door shut before she could decide to add anything more embarrassing to her departure, then squeezed Cami’s waist. She responded by coming up on her tiptoes to kiss him, and he let it sink through him, pulling her tighter against him when she started to drop to her heels. She smiled against his mouth, her fingers playing along the collar of his tee.
“Sorry about the interruption,” he murmured along her cheekbone, down to the lobe of her ear.
“It’s okay.” She slid her arms around his shoulders and enveloped him in the warmth of her. “Should I have stayed hidden?”
“Nah. Unless you would have preferred that.” With a regretful sigh, he pulled back, reaching up behind his neck to take one of her hands in his. “Now that my sister knows you’re not imaginary, you’ve got a target on your back.”
“She seemed nice.”
“So does a bait trap, until you eat its food and realize you can’t get out.” He started toward the kitchen, and Cami followed him. The ease and happiness radiating from her seeped into his muscles like a heated blanket. He loathed to ruin her mood, but now that there was a dinner invite on the table, there was an important discussion to be had. “Come on. Let’s get a drink.”
As he drew her into the kitchen, she seated herself at the table and cocked her head at him. “I don’t have to come to your family dinner, you know. I won’t be offended if you don’t want me to.”
He pulled a couple of wine glasses from the cupboard above the sink and uncorked a bottle of red from the small wine rack tucked on the counter against the wall. As he poured them each a glass, he considered her wording. It was just ambiguous enough to leave him wondering whether she wanted to come or not. Very diplomatic of her, but not exactly helpful.
“Before we decide about that,” he said slowly, choosing his words with deliberation, “there’s something we need to talk about.” He faced her then, crossing the tile floor to hand her a glass of wine, in time to see her sigh, an expression of resignation tinged with worry flickering across her face.
“I know,” she agreed.
He stopped short, one hand on the back of a chair he’d been about to pull out for himself. “You know,” he repeated. His throat went dry, and his heart thudded harshly against hisribcage. She couldn’t know, though, could she? Had Lenny told her? No, that couldn’t be it. If she knew his real job, she wouldn’t be discussing it over a glass of wine in his kitchen. Certainly not after sucking his brains out through his dick and then riding him into his headboard.
She blinked at him. “Of course I know. We had an agreement, and we didn’t stick to it. We need to talk about that.” She shrugged one shoulder, thoughtfully swishing her wine in its glass. “We should have talked about it before...well, before all that.” She gestured in the general direction of his bedroom.
A knot of tension inside him unraveled.
“You’re right.” He lowered into the chair adjacent to her, a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth, though the need for a discussion about the rest of it kept it from spreading. “That’s on me. I should have put the brakes on before the clothes came off.”
“Oh, don’t be all noble about it.” She waved a hand swishily through the air, then sipped from her wine glass with the other. “I’m a grown-up. I knew what I was doing. I will have ill-advised sex if I want to.”
“Okay, okay, fair enough, but we can talk about it now.” She nodded her assent, urging him to continue. “Oh, I’m starting? This is my show?”
“Isn’t it?” She cocked an eyebrow at him and smiled. “This whole thing was your sleazy idea.”
“Hey! I didn’t hear you complaining between the multiple orgasms, Camille.” To his delight, her cheeks took on that adorable red-pink flush that came on whenever she was embarrassed and too stubborn to change the subject. “But fine. I’ll drive—as you know, we agreed to an unspecified number of sex toy testing sessions involving limited nudity and no skin-to-skin contact. Does this align with your understanding of the agreement?”
She forced her face into something neutral and professional in spite of her blush, almost frowning with the effort of it, and nodded.
“Excellent,” he continued. “Everything was going according to plan until I gallantly came to return a sock you left at my house, and you threw yourself at me.”
“Excuse me?” she blurted, coming forward in her chair as though she might launch at him.
He laughed and flinched away with one hand raised. “It’s okay, I understand completely! I’m a very attractive man. You couldn’t help yourself. It’s only natural.”
“Keep talking, and I won’t be able to help myself when I strangle you.”
“Also understandable.” He took a moment to breathe, sober up, and gave his wine glass a little nudge, watching the liquid slosh inside it. “Seriously, though, it’s important to me that you know it was never my intention to escalate things to that level.” Her mouth opened to interject, but he raised a hand to hold her off. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. You’re beautiful. I like you as a person—” Probably an egregious understatement at this point. “—and I’m attracted to you. But that wasn’t what we agreed to, and I don’t want you to feel like I took advantage. I swear I intended to keep my hands to myself. If you want to go back to the original arrangement and forget the last few, uh, sessions happened, we can do that. Or we can call the whole thing off.”
She considered this for several long beats. “What part of what happened in the bedroom half an hour ago makes you think I want to call this off?”
In spite of himself, he grinned. “It’s not that I’m expecting that to be your response, but I feel like it’s important you know it’s an option. We don’t have to continue the...well, the non-toy, penetrative sex part if you’d rather not.” God help him, just the word ‘penetrative’ made her flush deepen, and making it happenwas far too satisfying. “We don’t have to continue any of it if you feel like you’ve gotten all you want out of this.”
For some reason, presenting that option aloud stung in a way that mentally acknowledging it hadn’t. The idea that she might not be on the same wavelength at all, might have just been taking this situation for exactly what it was on the packaging. He hadn’t gone into it expecting more, that wouldn’t have been fair, but... Well, he wasn’t ready to give this up. He liked spending time with her too much, even when they were fully clothed. This could go somewhere, maybe, if he could just tell her the truth.
“That depends.” She had cast her warm brown eyes downward, a suggestive half-smile on her lips. “Do you feel like you’ve shown me all you can?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Definitely not.” He’d invent new things to show her if it came down to it.
