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“Stop it,” I grumble, using my elbow to push her out of my space.
“Oh, god, Gabe,” she groans, “Please tell me you’re into anal because I want to grab the stick lodged up your ass and pull it out.”
My dentist is going to kill me. I already grind my teeth in my sleep and I’m grinding them now.
Meditation playlists. That might help me survive the next ten days. I’ll download some tonight.
“Areyou into anal?” Ashley’s shocked voice wrecks my attempt at unclenching my jaw.
“My sex life is none of your business.”
“Except it is. Because we’re ‘fucking.’” She uses air quotes. “What am I supposed to tell people when they ask what you’re like in bed?”
“You tell them nothing.” We’ve signed NDAs. I only need to be seen with her. We don’t need to do interviews. She won’t be telling anyone anything about me.
“Boring.” She digs her phone out of her handbag and spends a few minutes scrolling in silence while I drive through traffic. I don’t for a minute believe she won’t improvise and say something unflattering about me in bed.
“Ashley—”
“Fine.” She dismisses me with a flick of her wrist. “I won’t say a word. I’ll smile like you’re the best lover in the world. Because I can act.”Unlike you, she adds under her breath.
I bite my tongue. Ashley goes silent.
Four long hours pass, and Ashley scrolls on her phone or stares out her window. I don’t know what music she listens to, so I stream a top forty playlist. She doesn’t sing along, but more importantly, she doesn’t complain.
We have a townhouse booked at a palatial inn styled as a Tuscan villa on Lake Seneca. There are no photographers around when we arrive, and Ashley follows me in without a word.
It doesn’t last.
She takes one look at the décor inside and laughs. “Wow, I feel like I’m at my grandmother’s.” She sniffs discreetly. “Disdain and Chanel Number Five.”
The décor is stodgy in a moneyed New England way. Ostentatious in a style that hasn’t changed in a century. David booked this place off Rose’s recommendation, but I don’t think the aesthetic was the selling point. Privacy and comfort were. And the two bedrooms.
“You can take the master bedroom.” Knowing Ashley, she’ll claim it anyway.
She runs her hand across the back of the couch, her pink nails scraping in a way that’s both ordinary and obscene. “This sofa is begging to be defiled. Do you think the middle-aged rich guys who stay here ever fuck their wives on it?” She bends over the back of it, gripping the wooden trim along the top like she’s being railed from behind.
“Ashley.” I can’t grit out anything beyond her name because it’s too easy to picture myself behind her, gripping her hips and making her scream in pleasure.
“You’re right.” She straightens. “They fuck their mistresses on this sofa while their wives are at the spa. So. Now what?” Her smile is suggestive, her hand stroking the trim as she walks around and sits down, crossing her legs, looking somehow prim and naughty at the same time.
She’s killing me.
I pick up the spa voucher from the table and hand it to her with a smile. “You have an appointment.”
She barely glances at it before tossing it on the sofa next to her. “Are you going to fuck your mistress while I’m getting a facial?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Do you think I’d have a mistress?”
Ashley stands with a sigh. “You’d be a lot more interesting if you did.”
“Something tells me you’re not the sharing type.”
Her eyes go hard as she snatches up the spa pass. “I’m not. What time am I meeting you for dinner?”
“Seven thirty.”
“That gives you…five hours to work up the courage to hold my hand and maybe kiss me over dessert. Think it’ll be enough? Would it be easier to follow if I wrote a script?”
