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An hour ago, he’d have rejected that proposal outright. Seen it as irresponsible, damaging. It was still those things. It was harder to give words like irresponsible their due measure when a warm, willing woman pleasured herself on your hand. Thinking about it was for a time when he wasn’t still blissed, when he wasn’t hard, planning to take Flick on her knees.
“Are you too sore to go again?”
The answer was Flick moving to her hands and knees, showing him how wet she was. The question was, how would they feel when he got back from Des Moines?
Des Moines was three days of wall-to-wall bore. Lifesaving drugs and medical devices, which he normally found fascinating, had never been so dull.
Instead of being in the Holiday Inn conference center with America’s finest drug companies and device-makers, his head was back in the condo with Flick.
He followed Wren down a corridor crowded with device and drug exhibitors flogging everything from robot pill dispensers for hospitals to cell-phone-controlled muscle stimulators for knee surgery patients.
He was speaking on a panel about supporting patients and advocacy through social media. It was the dreaded 3 p.m. spot where half the audience was only seated for the after-lunch snooze. But it was important profile-building for Rendel, and since it was being live cast and recorded, he needed to be on his game.
And his game wasn’t “how dare you leave your bag in the hall, let’s fuck.” Too bad.
“Tom, you’re here.” Dr. Evan Modal, the session moderator, pointed at the small riser on which a mock living room had been set up. “You’re in the red chair. You speak last. I’ll do an introduction to all of you up front and then it’s ten minutes each and fifteen minutes for Q&A.”
“Great. Thanks.” He sat in the red chair and grinned at Wren, who’d snagged a front-row seat. She made a face, then put her hands behind her ears so they stuck out sideways. The universal signal for Harry, who had wing-nut ears.
Huh. How about that? He hadn’t known the boss was going to be here. His meeting with Harry had been canceled and rescheduled three times—it was starting to look deliberate.
He waited while the room filled up with conference delegates, greeted his two co-presenters and listened to Evan’s introduction. Somewhere after the first speaker offered statistics on the reach of Facebook, he drifted off. At least half the audience already had.
There was so much about that episode with Flick to unpack. And top of the list of oddities was that she annoyed the heck out of him but got him more turned on than he could remember being. That most certainly did not happen in any other situation in which he was even mildly irritated. The two states didn’t come together in any conceivable way, except when Flick was the irritant up his nose.
The kind of annoyed she made him had a slippery edge to it. It dissolved into out-and-out necessity with an urgency to it that was frankly unnerving. Flick did it for him. Revved his engines like nothing else. And then mysteriously, he found a kind of peace and ease in bed with her that wasn’t so easily replaceable by a long hike or a favorite meal cooked.
Did that say more about him or about her?
She was playing games with him, that was certain. It was surprising how much he liked it. Was it the blatant sexual challenge? Maybe he had some unresolved authority issues and she flipped that switch with her personality and her deliberate insubordination.
That had to be it.
Christ.
“Tom O’Connell, are you with us?”
He still worried about the idea that with Flick’s games he might lose himself enough to—
“It seems Tom needs a caffeine fix.”
Fuck. He jerked at the sound of laughter, looked up and caught Wren with her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking. “I’d like to say I was demonstrating the soporific effects of social media, but Evan is right, I need caffeine.”
That got another laugh, but it was a damn rocky recovery.
Half an hour later he stood from the red chair to scattered applause, shook hands with his fellow presenters, and thanked Evan for inviting him on the panel as the audience raced for the door and the refreshment tables.
Wren was waiting when he stepped down.
“Think you sampled too many silicone breas
t implants today,” she said. “What happened?”
He sampled his shoes. That was a regrettable screwup. All the more embarrassing because he’d never been caught out like that, with Harry in the audience and the session live-streaming and with no chance for the dead air to be edited out. His screwup was available forever. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“It was the vaginal mesh implants for incontinence that did it to me, broke my concentration.”
Wren grunted. “Remind me to do my pelvic floor exercises every day.”
