And she was happy to have the wine when Knox finally point out the elephant in the room.
“So,” he said, twirling spaghetti around his fork.“A threesome.”
And just like that, the nerves were back.She took a fortifying gulp of wine, ignored the heat blooming in her face, and looked him in the eye with a bravado she was far from feeling.“Yeah.”
He returned the look calmly, a hint of humor in his smokey eyes.“Tell us about that.”
She wanted to gulp more wine, but was afraid it would look desperate.Reminding herself that they were just talking, she reached for courage.“It started out as a fantasy,” she admitted.“I was in my last year of college, and I was going through a ménage romance phase.”
Jesse blinked.“What’s a ménage romance?”
More heat flooded into her face.“It’s, um, a romance novel where instead of two main characters who fall in love, there are three or more.”
“Three ormore?”Jesse looked at Knox, then at Chloe, his gaze bright with interest.“Is that as hot as it sounds?”
His lusty candor made it easy to laugh, and loosened her tongue.“Yeah.We, um, call them ‘one-handed reads’.”
“One-handed reads.Oh, hell yes.Is there a website I can go to?One-Handed Reads dot com?”
“I don’t think so,” Chloe said, still laughing.“But I could give you a list.”
Jesse rose half out of his seat.“Hang on, let me get something to write with.”
“Easy, Horny Harry.”Knox planted a hand on Jesse’s shoulder to nudge him back down and aimed a look at Chloe.“Don’t encourage him.”
She folded her lips together contritely.“Sorry.”
“You gonna be able to maintain?”Knox asked Jesse.
“No problem.”Jesse grabbed his water glass and gulped, then dipped his fingers in, dug out a piece of ice, and held it to the back of his neck.“No problem at all.”
Knox shook his head, but Chloe could see the amusement lurking at the corners of his mouth.“So it was a fantasy,” he prompted.
“Right.”Forcing herself to focus, Chloe nodded.“For a long time, that’s all it was.But after a while, I started to feel like I was missing out on something by not acting on it.”
“And you never had a boyfriend, a partner, you wanted to act it out with?”
“I brought it up once a couple of years ago, with this guy I’d been dating for about six months.”Through the stab of remembered humiliation, she rolled her eyes.“Ask me how that went.”
“Not well, I take it.”
“He called me a pervert,” she recalled with a grimace.“And a bunch of other things I’d rather not repeat.”
“Asshole,” Jesse muttered, all traces of humor gone.
“To say the least,” Chloe agreed and sighed.“We’d told each other our fantasies, and one of his was a threesome with two women, so I thought it was safe to share mine.”
“Majorasshole.”
“After that, I kept it to myself,” she finished.
“But you never forgot it.”
She looked at Knox.“No.”
“Why now?”he asked.
“What do you mean?”
