I had come home wanting a man.
His mouth. His hands. That broad, steady body I had only gotten one decent touch from and had been building trouble around ever since.
I stood there in the quiet for a second and let the wanting have its name.
Then I walked to the bedroom like I already knew exactly where the night was headed, dropping one earring on the dresser and the other on the chaise because precision had left me somewhere around the bridge. My phone buzzed once in my purse. I ignored it. If it was him, good. If it wasn’t, I didn’t care.
The dress came off first.
I peeled it down slowly, silk dragging over my thighs before it landed in a dark heap at my feet. Then the bra. Then the panties, warm and damp enough to make me pause when I hooked my fingers into the sides and pulled them down.
“Ridiculous,” I murmured to the empty room.
My body offered no rebuttal.
It did not need one.
I stood naked in front of the mirror for a moment. Gloss a little faded. Pixie still laid. Nipples hard, skin warm from lotion and city air and being looked at the way he had looked at me.
That was the part still working on me.
How he looked.
Greedy enough for me to notice, controlled enough for me to respect. Like a man trying hard to stay decent while his body had already moved on to less civilized thoughts.
I understood that look because I had worn its twin all the way home.
I wrapped my hair up, turned the shower on hot, and stepped in before the water had fully settled, hissing once when it hit my skin. Steam climbed fast, wrapping the room in warmth. I braced one hand against the tile and let the water run over my shoulders, my throat, my breasts, down between my thighs where I was still too aware and nowhere near sorry enough about it.
Carl Thomas was still in my head.
Hey now…
That low, intimate sweetness of it. The kind of song that made a woman feel held in her own wanting instead of ashamed of it.
And God, I was wanting.
His voice found me first. The texture of it. That baritone. The way it dropped at the ends of certain sentences like he knew better than to oversell a point. The way my name had sounded in his mouth. The way he’d said I actually looked like myself and somehow made honesty feel like a hand closing around the back of my neck.
I slid my palm over my stomach, lower.
There had been a time I would have ignored this. Let the tension follow me into sleep. Let maturity have the last word.
There had also been a time I would have brought him home and let him work the rest out himself.
Tonight, I had done neither.
Tonight, I stood under hot water with Micah Sutton’s eyes in my head and one hand between my legs like that was somehow a sensible compromise.
It wasn’t.
It was enough for now.
My fingers slipped through my slickness easily, and the first slow circle over my clit made my breath catch so sharply I had to close my eyes and just feel it.
There.
That ache.
