He dipped his head down and kissed his way across my clavicle. “Because I’m married to my job. I have no life outside of my work and it will be another five or six years until I have time for one.”
“So, that’s your way of telling me you don’t usually do this?”
The doors opened. We stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hall, stopping in front of a door I presumed to be his. He pressed a lazy kiss to my lips that seemed to wrap around me like a vine, twisting and gathering until my skin was enclosed in heat and need so great it swept everything from my mind.
“Ineverdo this,” he whispered against the corner of my mouth. “You probably won’t believe that because it’s the kind ofthing a lot of guys say, but you know I don’t have a lot of time. I’m not going to waste it lying to you.”
“Whitney,” I said, out of absolutely nowhere. “My name. It’s Whitney.”
A slow smile brightened his face as he opened the door. “Whitney, I’d like to spend the next nine hours doing unspeakably rude things to you. I know it’s a lot to ask but?—”
I grabbed him by the lapels and sealed my lips to his. We walked backward into the room and the door closed behind us with a heavy slam that seemed to spur both of us into action. My dress was bunched up around my waist. His shirt and jacket went flying while his trousers fell to his knees. I tossed him a condom from my clutch while I peeled down the shapewear as gracefully as possible. A second later, he hooked an arm under my thighs and boosted me up against the wall.
Our eyes locked as he pushed into me. He was thick andhuge, and it was a damn good thing we’d spent the past few hours groping and grinding all over each other because this would’ve hurt without all that buildup.
His lips parted on a quiet groan. “Whit,” he cried. “Fuck, honey. You really are going to stop my heart.”
“Probably not.” I shoved my fingers into his hair and kissed him. It was the only thing I could do as I felt myself fraying at the seams. We were ravenous, too starved to care about the mess we were making, the steps we were skipping. This was more urgent than the urgency of most one-night stands. It was almost primitive, like we’d been waiting ages for this and now—finally,now—we could let go.
He slipped a hand into my bodice, teasing a finger around my nipple as he hammered me into the wall. “Why are you so fucking perfect?” he asked, his voice impossibly deep and rumbly.
I loved it. I wanted to suck it from a spoon.
“It’s one of my many gifts,” I said.
“Your gifts are going to fucking kill me, Whit.”
He pulled the bodice back and dragged his tongue over my nipple and I was more than a little shocked by the breathy wail that shot out of me in response. He brought his teeth down, biting just enough to have me clenching around him hard.
“Fuck, what did you just do to me?” He groaned into my breast. “Dying, honey. I’mdyinghere.”
“You can’t die on me now.” I tightened my grip on his hair. “We have nine more hours.”
He bit down on my nipple as he slammed into me, and I broke like a mirror that never saw the fist coming for it. Everything was unbelievably hot and sensitive and loose, and all I could do was cling to him as he broke too.
Three
Whitney
Rule Number Five:
One night only. No overtime.
Henry slept like a bear.
He was a solid, immovable slab of man all the way from the rock-hard arm locked around my waist to the erection nudging my hip. Yet there was something precious about the way his thick lashes fanned over his cheeks and his lips gathered in a pout. The need to run my index finger over those lips and cheeks swelled inside me until I closed my eyes and reminded myself of the exit strategy.
I didn’t have time for another round. Even if I wanted one, Meri was waiting for me. More importantly, I was convinced my vagina would go into lockdown if Henry so much as glanced in that direction.
It took some careful maneuvering but I wiggled my way out of Henry’s grasp and managed to tuck and roll off the mattress without waking him. I could handle the awkward morning-after convo though I really didn’t want to. I wanted this night to godown in the wedding crashing memory book as the best of the summer and I didn’t want anything to haze over the perfection of it. I wanted to think about this night when I was seven months deep into another round of work-induced celibacy and I wanted to remember Henry as the guy who’d said, “Hold on tight, honey,” when he bent me over the desk and fucked me like it was his job.
I did not want to deal with stilted offers to exchange numbers and I didn’t want to know what his voice sounded like when he tried to let me down gently. I didn’t need either of those things and I didn’t want to leave with that bitter taste on my tongue.
Because he was one of the good ones, at some point in the night, he’d draped my dress over the back of a chair and set the shapewear that Meri had named Girdle McHurdle for the lunge-and-shimmy required to get into it on the seat with my clutch, which now held eight fewer condoms than it did yesterday. My shoes sat beside the chair.
As I slipped the dress over my head, I shot one last look at his long, rugged form. His dark hair shone in the morning sunlight. A tattoo of trees and mountains wrapped around one bicep. Woodsy to the core, this one. The bedsheets rode low on his hips, showing off a delicious pair of dimples below his waist. A small pile of damp washcloths sat on the floor beside the bed, one for all the times he’d put me back together after breaking me apart.
He really was one of the good ones.
