“What, um, what changes did you want to make?”
“One.” He leans over the bar, eyes glittering with a light that’s somehow both burning hot and ice cold and cuts straight through to my marrow. “We’ve already established that I touch. I lick. I suck. I bite.”
Oh, god.My knees go weak. Bite? He wants to bite me?
Crap, he already has, hasn’t he?
It takes everything I’ve got not to reach up and run my fingers over where he did it the other night.
“You afraid of this?” With the flick of one thick finger between us, he somehow encompasses whateverthisis.
“No.No.” I back up a step and bump into a chair, feeling hemmed in. “This wasn’t the deal, okay? We agreed.”
“We did. You’re right.”
Somehow, though perfectly adequate, his words only make me feel worse. Guilty and dishonest. Like I’m the one doing something wrong here.
Which I’m not. He’s pushing things.
But you let him get away with it. Every time.
Okay, that voice needs to shut the hell up.
There arestillrules. This isn’t about affection or communication. And it’s definitely not about the attraction simmering—boiling—between us.
An attraction I was sure I’d imagined until he offered to knock me up, as he put it. Since then… Oh, god, since then everything’s gone to absolute hell.
“Come over to mine for a drink, okay? No rules against that.” He’s got that opaque thing going in his eyes again—they’re hard and dark, the blue nothing but eerie rings around his bottomless pupils. For some reason I can’t begin to explain that hardness both irritates and excites me. “Pretty sure we’ve got a session on the schedule for tomorrow night.”
My thighs tighten in response to that sentence. My entire body’s on a string and he’s just leading it around, entirely separate from my brain.
“Um, yes. Yes, we do.”
“We’re moving it. I want the session tonight.” When I don’t respond, he smiles. “Grab your keys. Let’s go.”
I should insist that I’m in charge here. At work and, yes, for the other thing we’re doing, too. Nobody bosses me around like this.
But I guess we’re both pretty aware now that none of this is what it’s supposed to be.
Entirely complicit, I slide the cash into the bag uncounted, take it back to my office with the receipts, and lock it in the safe, then walk back up front with my keys and purse and coat.
Throughout all of this, I’ve got plenty of opportunities to back out. To change my mind, to argue that he’s wrong and take off, angry. I do none of that. Instead, I go out like a zombie, get in my car, and follow him back to his place.
We pull up to what looks like a garage, but sort of old school. A vintage brick warehouse that’s been redone in the last twenty years. It’s got huge roll-up doors, which would make amazing front windows for a restaurant. I’d call the place The Garage or something equally unimaginative.
He leads me around to the side through a door and into a space that looks exactly like one of those old-fashioned New York gyms from ’80s movies about boxers. Smells like it, too.
“What is this place?”
“Place I bought years ago.”
I blink. “You own this?”
“A friend was being evicted a while back. He needed cash and I figured it was a good place to put some cash.” He leads me up a narrow iron staircase to a sort of catwalk overlooking thewhole space, which from this vantage is truly massive. “Got the building at a seized property auction.”
“Wow.” I lean over the railing and look down at all the punching bags and weights and the big ring in the middle of it. “It’s kinda nice.”
“Yeah?” He leans beside me and stares down. “Ricky’d appreciate the compliment, although…”
