“What? I like the beard,” I whispered defensively, stroking his face with my fingers. And there was no way he could have heard me over the music, but his fingers tightened on my hips, and he pulled me in closer anyway.
He trailed a hand up my arm to grab my wrist and move it back so I was clutching his neck. He spun me around in a quarter turn, and suddenly we were dancing again, the two of us like a tiny, perfect island in a sea of bodies.
Unlike with John, though, there was nothing platonic about this dancing. My cock was hard even before Knox widened his stance and pulled me against his thigh. And when I felt his erection—a very proportionately sized erection, which was to sayhuge—I couldn’t help but moan.
He wanted me. He un-misinterpret-ably wanted me.
Yes, fucking yes, I thought, and I only realized I’d said it out loud when Knox’s eyes flared and his hand dipped from my hip to the upper curve of my ass.
I undulated my body against his, breathing in his air. His natural scent was overlaid with the faintest tinge of Scotch and sweat and maybe smoke, all of which should have been off-putting but was not. I wanted to climb him like a tree. I wanted to fuck him hard and imprint myself on his brain. I wanted to sit on his…
My thoughts short-circuited as Knox bent his head just the tiniest bit and his lips hovered over mine, so close that his beardtickled my chin. So close that I could feel every particle of air between us buzzing with the electricity we generated together.
Knox was going to kiss me. Knox Sunday was for real going to kiss me. And if I never won another thing in my entire damn life, at least I’d have this.
His mouth touched mine, and my stomach swooped. His tongue darted out to trace the seam of my lips, and I shivered convulsively.
Then Knox blinked and pulled back. “You taste like lime,” he growled.
“Yeah. Gin and tonic.” I grinned up at him, but he frowned. Did he have a problem with citrus fruits?
He pulled back just slightly, though his arms remained around me. “How many gin and tonics?”
What? He wanted to talk about thisnow? “Um… four. No, five? I’m pretty sure. Plus a couple at the hotel, but that was ages ago. Why?”
He closed his eyes and pressed our foreheads together. “Seven drinks.” He groaned just a little. “Goodman, what am I going to do with you?”
There were a million answers to that question. A billion. And if Knox had the time, I had the stamina and organizational skills to make sure we did every single one of them.
But before I could express that, my stomach did a funny kind of dance move of its own, and my head spun in a way that had nothing to do with Knox’s closeness. “Knox, I think… I maybe don’t feel so great?”
“No shit.” Knox snorted and wrapped an arm around my waist. “Let’s get you home.”
CHAPTER SIX
KNOX
“Yeah,if you can resend that invoice tomorrow, I’ll be sure it gets paid Thursday,” I assured our feed vendor, making a note on my calendar to follow up in the morning. “I apologize for the misunderstanding. Things have been a little crazy here the last few months. I’ve been wading through a backlog of receipts, and?—”
A flash of movement caught my eye, and I looked up to find Goodman standing behind his desk with his arms stretched toward the ceiling in a Sun Salutation. The move made his T-shirt ride up and his shorts ride so far down they barely caught on his lean hip bones and revealed the thick black band of his boxers.
I adjusted myself surreptitiously under my desk.
Goodman had gotten incredibly fond of yoga in the four days since we’d been back from Boston. These days, he stretched constantly—leaning over couches and countertops to stretch his lower back, bracing himself on doorframes to stretch his pecs, lunging up the stairs to our shared apartment when I was right behind him so he could “stretch his quads.”
And for a twenty-four-year-old, the man was a mess of aches and pains, from the trapezius muscles he’d asked me to knead inthe kitchen Sunday morning to his “old hamstring injury” flare-up—which, in a weird anatomical twist, was located in thefrontof Goodman’s thigh, though most humans kept their hamstrings in the back.
He’d also developed a strange insecurity about his clothing. He’d asked me at least three times to check the fit of his T-shirts over his shoulders, he’d begged me to tell him myhonestopinion about the way his ass looked in his tight jeans, and—my personal favorite—he’d made me solemnly swear to give him “friendly erection checks” on a daily basis to make sure I couldn’t see a dick print in the loose basketball shorts he wore around the apartment so he didn’t “make you uncomfortable, Knox.”
Seriously.
From a guy with a degree in applied mathematics, you’d expect at least a subtle nod toward logic in his attempts to drive me insane, but no.
I knew exactly what Goodman was up to. This was payback for putting his drunk ass to bedaloneThursday night after his gin-tastic hurl into a trash can outside Bar-Z and then leaving him to wake up alone while I’d grabbed a very quick cup of coffee with Rick, who’d been way too distracted by some problem at the office (“Nothing you need to worry about, Knox! You’re on leave, for fuck’s sake”) to actually tell me how things were going.
Did knowing it was payback mean that I could stop my eyes from tracking every single movement Goodman made as he dipped into a Downward Dog or stop my dick from responding to it? Did it mean that I hadn’t jerked off literally every single night since then, thinking about Goodman’s eyes on me as I’d changed clothes at the hotel and the feel of his body undulating against mine on the dance floor?
That would be a solid no. Goodman was un-ignorable, and reciting all Dr. Travers’s mantras couldn’t change that.
