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Unless she’d accepted his invitation to come over simply to make him choose. Financial advisor or lover. There was probably a third option in there, something like both, but his head hurt to think about it.
By the time Mena buzzed his intercom in the early afternoon, he’d eaten, gulped down a disgusting hangover cure, taken some headache tablets as backup and was feeling less like the scummy gaffer tape stuck to the bottom of his shoe after a show.
If she only wanted to talk about the weather, he could do that. He could find out what season she liked best, if she chased the sun on holidays or got frightened by lightning storms. So far all he really knew about her was that she was a good listener, nerdy with numbers, owned a fabulous renovator’s delight terrace house, hated spiders, smelled complicated like the ground floor of David Jones where all the perfumes were, wore lingerie like a pinup girl, dressed like she meant business, liked his tattoo and did a good job of adoring his dick.
There were other things he knew, like how soft her skin was, how sensitive her perky nipples were, how she had dimples in her thighs and that her hips were the right size for his hands. But if he focused on those things, on the fact that this incredibly smart, ambitious, beautiful woman made perfect ham and cheese toasties, and loved being on her knees for him, he’d make a mistake with her and what they had was already a fragile thing that maybe relied too much on the idea of it being forbidden.
It wasn’t nothing. It was a whole lot more than he’d known about a lot of women he’d slept with, but it wasn’t anywhere near enough.
For all that, he had an inkling Mena could see him through the noise that was being Mark Grippen, financial fuck-up, larrikin drummer of Lost Property, and if he was right about that, he was going to do his best to make her think he was transparent like glass.
The last vestiges of his thickheadedness had gone off to play in the traffic when Mena rang his doorbell.
Too late, he only realized he hadn’t put on a shirt when he opened the door to her, and she made a little squeaking sound.
“Mena. Hi. Sorry. I’ll. Shit. Shirt,” he heel-bumped his forehead. Smooth, dickhead. “Come in.”
She laughed, a great gust of it. She looked different, looser, more touchable. More sunshine. Wearing a dress with flowers on it, big roses in soft colors, the fabric light and summery, slides on her feet and a bag that wasn’t for work over her shoulder. Her hair was tied back in a simple ponytail and though he couldn’t see her eyes through her sunnies as she moved past him to come inside, he got the impression she was laughing there as well.
His chest got tight. There were a million ways he could screw this up.
“I’ll go put a shirt on.” He closed the door and took a steadying breath before he turned to face her. She’d pushed her glasses to the top of her head and her eyes weren’t exactly laughing.
“You don’t need to put a shirt on.”
They were . . . hungry? “Okay.” He’d grab one anyway. They weren’t at the wander around half dressed before sex stage of anything together. “I’ll give you the tour.”
She stepped out of her slides and now they were both barefoot. “You don’t need to give me a tour.”
He stared at her, trying to work out what exactly was going down here while his senses ran riot. She was hungry. She wasn’t here to rip him a new one or swear him to secrecy or take the premises tour. She was here to jump his bones. Screw the shirt. He bloody liked this woman more than was healthy and he was going to kiss her forgetful when he got something off his naked chest.
“Radio silence, what was that about? I thought we were good and then I thought I’d done something to fuck up, and I couldn’t work out what it was.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. But this is—”
She was going to say they were wrong. “This is whatever we want it to be.” She nodded. He blew out a breath. “Your call, Mena.”
“I am out of my mind. You don’t need pants either,” she said, and she was on him before he had time to be impressed, stepping into him, hands to his chest, lips to his collarbone.
He got a handful of that dress and lifted it up her body and then over her head, taking her sunglasses with it, then there was skin and more of that sexy lingerie, only this time, no hosiery and more Mena between the bottom edge of a bra that lifted her breasts high, and the silky stuff of her undies.
He tossed the dress and her glasses on a side table. They hadn’t made it out of his entrance way. “Any rules I need to know about here?”
She unbuttoned his lucky jeans, toyed with the zipper and he lost the capacity to hear over the thudding of his heart. All his sensory powers went to his dick, which was rigid to the touch of her palm through the denim, hard enough to split the zip.
She was going to get that tour in a minute, a lightning fast one to the nearest flat surface, because he needed to feel the weight of Mena’s body over his to wipe out the fear that he’d lost a very good thing before he had a chance to make it his, like a long time
ago.
“Later, we’re going to talk about the weather and ice-cream flavors and who you like to listen to, what you like to watch.”
Bad move that, she took her hand away from the scene of the crime and cupped his cheek. “Later, we can do whatever you like.”
He drew a few musical notes over the tops of her breasts with his fingertip. “I missed you.” He was ridiculously pleased she was here. Felt it all the way to his toes.
“It’s only been a day.”
It might’ve been years; his radar was all squiffy around Mena, like a whale driven to beach itself. He was heartbeats off lying on the floor at her feet. She didn’t sound surprised. She sounded smug, like she’d guessed it. He drew the band out of her hair and took a handful of it. “Didn’t know there was an acceptable time limit for missing someone.”
