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I begrudgingly opened the door and let her walk in. Though I was thanked for my gentlemanly behavior by a phenomenal view of her ass in that dress.
I wonder if she’d let me in the rear door.
I cleared my throat and pushed that thought to the back of my mind—for now. Nora set her clutch down on the dining room table, which screamed romance with the wine chilling in a bucket, flowers, and candles.
“What’s all this?” she asked.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d eaten dinner. So I went with something you could pick at.”
“That was thoughtful.” She turned back to the table for a minute. “And the flowers and wine?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. “My assistant did that.”
Nora smiled. “Is that a bashful look? It’s kind of cute, though not one I thought you had in your arsenal of expressions.”
“Wiseass. After I set it all up, I realized it was a bit much for…you know, for our purposes.”
“You mean for a hookup night?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, at least you have a good assistant.”
“I do. Would you like a glass of wine from my romantic setup?”
Nora smiled. “Sure.”
I grabbed the bottle from the ice bucket and went into the kitchen to uncork it.
Nora took a seat on a chair on the opposite side of the island. “So, I think we should probably talk about ground rules before we go any further.”
I slid a glass of wine over to her and poured mine. “Shoot. I like rules.”
“You do?”
“Of course. It’s not any fun to break them when you don’t know what they are.”
“Beck…”
“Relax. I’m joking.” I sipped my wine and shrugged. “I’m ready. Lay what you got on me.”
“Okay, well, I think these types of arrangements are often ruined because people keep pushing the boundaries further and further, and one of the two people looks back and realizes their hookup has inched into relationship territory. So the point of making some ground rules is to keep us firmly in the hookup zone.”
“Alright. So what are these rules?”
“First, I think unless we’re with Louise, we should keep our time together limited to sex.”
“So you walk in, I strip you naked, and you hightail it out of here when we’re done?”
She laughed. “Maybe not that dramatic, but more along the lines of we shouldn’t watch movies together beforehand or spend the night after.”
I didn’t love that, but I also understood why she would make the rule. It might have been where I’d gone wrong with my previous supposedly no-strings-attached relationships.
“Okay. What else?”
“No dates. No restaurants or movies or whatever.”
“Alright.”
