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He smiled into her hair. He wasn’t the only one who said unromantic things, although that “oh God,” said lustfully, so not appropriate for church, acted like rocket fuel revving him further.
“Say it, again, Lenny.”
“Scuba suit,” she moaned, and they both laughed, and the next thing they did with their mouths was full of “oh God.” He managed to kiss her while losing his coat and navigating around walls and furniture and onto the couch in the dark where he pulled her into his lap. She wasn’t going anywhere but deep into this greed and reverence.
He gave his heat and his hands and lips. He learned what she liked to feel, and he let the thrum inside him build and build, giving him waves of muscle-tightening pleasure.
Lenny got his shirt out of his pants and his buttons undone and made him say “oh God” in a voice he barely recognized as his own as he got a cufflink tangled in her hair when she kissed his chest.
“You still want to change?” He’d worked out where the tape was, and it wasn’t much of a barrier, but he didn’t want to embarrass her by sliding his hand past it and inside her dress without being sure she was okay with that.
“I want too many things. I want to see you without this shirt with some lights on, I don’t want to stop kissing you, and I want to invite you to stay the night and shut up, Lenore,” she said. They went back to lip-on-lip action, and it lit him up inside to have her like this, no judgments, no hesitation.
He was well past sensible consideration of where they were, had Lenny on her back, had his hand on the smooth skin of her thigh, and his head brimming with the scent of her perfume mixed with her heat of arousal. He had a slow hip grind going down that made Lenny writhe and put him right on the edge when the lights came on, blinding them, and a voice said, “Hey, accountant, I’d better see a condom before you get anywhere near my sister’s intrauterine.”
Chapter Twenty
Ida Dalton had said the disreputable rogues were the best to have in your bed.
Lenny didn’t need to be behind the one-way glass at the mock auction house. It’s not like Halsey required her PowerPoint Girl skills, and really, she should’ve stayed away for the principle, but this was where she could best watch Halsey being disreputable, and she hadn’t near had her fill of watching him, and certainly not of having his touch.
This was preparation for having him in bed.
Strangest foreplay ever.
Also, she couldn’t resist wanting to see Cookie Jar drop a bundle on a fake painting. And after being caught out by Mallory, she needed an exc
use to see Halsey before their next formal date. Any excuse.
Cookie Jar was late. Halsey was nervous—she knew how to read that in him now. He focused his energy on an object, a cufflink, or something in his hands. This time, it was his phone. The screen was dark, but he kept running his finger around the outer edge.
“He’s not coming,” he said to Zeke, who was playing the part of art consultant to the uber rich. Useful they didn’t look like brothers. Zeke’s hair raven wing dark, and Halsey’s the color of wheat, shot through with caramel shadows. The kind of color treatment you’d pay a fortune for.
Zeke was stalking about the gallery, adjusting paintings and playing with the lighting. There were a dozen fake famous paintings, including a Caravaggio, a Renoir, two Picassos, a Van Gogh, and three Andy Warhols. Lenny knew nothing about art, but there was nothing fake looking about the paintings, even though they were all painted last week by an eighty-year-old forger from Flushing.
“He’s deliberately late. Keep your shirt on,” Zeke said. He stopped moving and looked directly at Lenny in her hiding place. “Unless you’d like to see the shirt off?”
“Yes!” she shouted at the glass, knowing they couldn’t hear her. Yes. She’d had her hands all over Halsey’s chest over his shirt, and she very much wanted to see what promised to be impressive. And she might have, if one of them had had the presence of mind to turn a lamp on before they got hot and heavy, and before Mallory had her fight with Ginny and came home unexpectedly to scare the lust out of them.
Was there anything more humiliating than having your baby sister catch you dry humping your fake accountant on the couch?
Possibly having your mark not show up to his own conning.
Zeke slapped Halsey on the shoulder. “Has she already seen the shirt off? Not impressed with those regular daily workouts?”
Did he work out daily? How very Excel Boy disciplined. The advantage of the one-way glass was they couldn’t see her slack-jawed expression.
Zeke’s messing about wasn’t helping Halsey relax.
Lenny had shouted at Mal to get out, but Halsey had kept his head and asked her nicely to switch the light off so they could have a moment. By the time they’d faced Mal, their clothing was back where it was supposed to be, but Lenny’s sense of humor wasn’t. Halsey had been the one to smooth things over, though he looked gorgeously tousled while he did it.
He’d said, “Your sister is my hero, and I’m sorry you walked in on that. We’re attracted to each other. We’re consenting adults, and that’s going to happen again.” He’d cut Lenny a questioning look. “I hope. But you weren’t meant to see it, and I’m sorry we squicked you out.”
After that, he’d taken over the kitchen, made them ice cream sundaes, and admired the redrawn unicorn on Mal’s forearm, declaring it very Twilight Sparkle to her amazement. He knew his unicorns.
It was funny now. Mal’s giddy delight at catching them out buried under her play-acted disgust. The way the leg of Lenny’s scuba pants had rolled up like a tourniquet, forcing her to go change or risk gangrene. How calm and measured Halsey was, taking Mallory seriously until he realized she wasn’t offended or scared, and not making any of them feel like what went down was anything other than inconvenient.
Funny, except the bit about her being Halsey’s hero. It’d been so long since she’d been admired by anyone. She enjoyed that very much. Like the rest of his behavior that night, it was ridiculously endearing.
