He snagged his wadded shirt from the end of the bed and wiped his fingers and mouth, and both his cheeks, and his neck, and then he stretched out beside me and gathered me into his arms.“That’s my girl.”
Pleasure was still zapping around in my body, making me reckless.
I’d never—never, ever?—
My heart clenched as it thumped.
Part of my brain was like,Don’t piss him off, dummy. You want that to happen again. And again. My God, we want that every night forever.
The money did not concern me just then. Not in the slightest.
And he might dothatagain, and we are all for him doingthatany time he feels like it.
The vast majority of my brain, like the lumpy top part and the squishy middle part, had been knocked offline by histongue,including the part of my brain that controlled what my vocal cords said.
So instead of being prudent, instead of shutting up and doing my job like I had every day at Johnson Construction LLC, I opened my big mouth. “That wasamazing.”
His tight smirk was a little smug as he looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
“That was the best moment ofmy entire life,”I told him.
I was watching the side of his face where he was staring up at the ceiling, and his eyebrows rose. “That’s gratifying.”
“No,I mean it.I thought I was going todie.And I wasfinewith that.”
His smile lightened his voice. “Practicing what to tell other women to earn that thousand dollars, are we?”
“Nicolai, I’m serious!” I pushed myself up and bracedmyself on one arm to look down at where he lay by my side, shirtless but still with his belt firmly buckled, at how insanely handsome he was.
As I sat up, my head spun like a tornado whipped the room around me.
I lay right back down, holding onto the comforter, squeezed tight in my fists as the room lazily slowed. “This wasreal.This wasimportant. I won’t go back.”
Nicolai turned his head to look at me. His eyebrows dipped. “Angel, what’s going on with you?”
My brain was careening around inside my head. “I feel likethe oppositeof being told there’s no Santa Claus. Like, there was this thing,this real thing,that everyone said was a fantasy and I shouldn’t believe in. Something that I thought wasbadand should be avoided, but it’s actuallyfantastic.Everyone told me Ishouldn’t.Everyone said I wassinfulif I did. And oh my God,wow.”
His thick arm tightened around my back where I was lying on him.
“It’s like everyone told me that chocolate ispoison,but they wereallsecretlygobblingdownpounds and poundsof Hershey’s and Nestle behind my back and thenlaughingat me for being too stupid to figure it out.”
He shifted on his hip, rolling to look at me, and smoothed my hair back from where it was tangled around my face and sticking to my lip. “I’m not laughing at you.”
“Buttheywere laughing at me, and I stayed anyway,” I fretted. “They were laughing at me because they were having fun seeing how much they could break me. They didn’t adhere to what they were telling me to do. His sisters were running around with all sorts of guys. His parents drink. But I had to be extra good, extra modest, and theylikedthat they’dmademe do that.”
His arms curled more tightly around me. “Oh, my sweet. That’s atrocious.”
I looked up at where he was staring at the ceiling. “I don’t want people to manipulate me and then laugh about it anymore.”
He dragged me to lie across his bare chest. His skin was hot under my hands and torso, my back cooled by the frigid air rushing from the air conditioner vents near the ceiling.
His heart pulsed against my cheek, and I was staring down at his belt and legs beyond.
“They shouldn’t have done that,” he said, his voice echoing in his chest under my ear. “I’m regretting that we merely put on a show in the casino when I could have grabbed that fool by his collar and punched the living fuck out of him.”
My first thought was,Oh, no. Don’t do that. You don’t have to do that.
He didn’thaveto do that?
