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He’d assumed they were going to kiss some more, but she seemed to be breathing against his neck. He hadn’t known such a thing could be so... enjoyable. He slid his hands up her bare back as he let his lips brush her shoulder.
“You smell good,” she said, speaking against his neck, and he felt as absurdly proud as if she’d complimented him on an actual skill. “I don’t want to stop smelling you.”
“Then by all means, carry on.”
She started working on his tie, and though he’d always been quite comfortable in his clothing, he suddenly felt like he was suffocating. He batted her hands away—she was struggling to loosen his double four-in-hand knot—and made quick work of the tie while she held her hands up as if he were threatening her.Himthreateningher. It was absurd.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
“Everything. This. You. Us.”
She scowled. “Funny like ‘Ha-ha’ or funny like ‘I never would have predicted it’?”
“The latter. Funny like ‘Dear god, this is going to be amazing.’”
That charmed her, though he’d been in earnest. Finishing with his buttons, he shuffled around until he could get his shirt off his arms.
She poked him in the chest. “You are surprisingly fit.”
“I move a lot of boxes.” Especially this year, with Torkel gone.
“You move a lot of boxes?”
He had said too much. Happily, there was a way to deflect from that fact. He put his hands on her cheeks and pulled herhead down and kissed her again. Kissed her senseless. Kissedhimselfsenseless. So much so that when she started to pull away, he held on and grunted like a caveman. How appalling. The noise snapped him back to his senses, and he let go. He was relieved to discover that she had initiated the break so she could take her pants off. And she was hitching her head at his like she wanted him to do the same, and to be quick about it.
He did, and he was.
When she was back on his lap—she was on his lap!—he felt as though he should warn her. “I have to tell you that it has, ah, been a while for me.”
“For me, too.”
“Really?” All right, that had come out sounding entirely too delighted. But he couldn’t help it. He had seen her upstairs—alone—after her dinner with Bashir Hussein, but he had no idea what had happened with Johannes Miller after the darts game.
“You’re wondering about Johannes Miller,” she said, reading his mind.
He dipped his head. “Not that it’s any of my business.”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” she echoed tartly. “But he was... Well, he was not the smartest goat in the herd. We said good night shortly after you saw us.” She made a self-deprecating face. “So it’s been a while.”
“Still, I’m almost certain my version of ‘a while’ is longer than yours.”
“What are we talking about here?”
“Five years.”
“Wow.” She wasn’t saying that in a mocking way, more as though she was impressed.
“Yes, I’ve been . . .” She let her hand drift down his chest, and he emitted a strangling noise. “Busy with work. Which I . . .” The hand was drifting lower, and he thought he might die. Might actually go into cardiac arrest right here with Cara on his lap. Well, there were worse ways to go. “Which I mention only to warn you that, to my great embarrassment, things might move rather . . . rapidly if you—”
He’d been trying to say that he didn’t want her to touch him yet. He wanted to pay her some attention first, but she interrupted him. Her hand had made its way down to his penis, and she took him in hand. “If I do this?”
“Cara,” he warned, and oh god, his penis had a mind of its own.
“Or maybe this?” She squeezed experimentally.
He’d thought himself fully hard, maximally erect, but she managed to coax him to heretofore unheard of degrees of arousal.
“Or how about this?” She kept up the pressure, but pumped her hand, and he groaned. The sight alone, of her red-lacquered fingers moving up and down, was nearly enough to do him in.
