“No. But I’ve heard people get weird after that. Need distance.”
“Do you need distance?” His gaze was searching. Intense. Maybe she did need distance.
“Do you want a hot chocolate?” he asked, not waiting for her to answer the last question.
She blinked. “Do I ...?” The most beautiful naked man she had ever beheld was offering her a hot chocolate after giving her two screaming orgasms? What other dimension had she fallen into?
“Well, I ... I would like one. But you don’t have to ...”
“Yes, I do. Get cozy. I’ll bring it to you.”
Get cozy.
A few minutes later, he returned with a tray that had two mugs on it and a plate of cookies.
She didn’t want distance from this at all. She wanted to freeze time and just be here for as long as she possibly could.
“Do you do this a lot?”
“No,” he said. “I assume you mean the hot chocolate and cookies. Not the rest.”
Well,thatwas lowering. Not that she was entitled to a brief history of his sex life.
“I have sex, Daisy,” he said, his tone firm. “But not usually here.”
“Usuallyas in . . .”
“Never. Never at my house.”
Her face felt warm. “Okay.”
“Why? Would you be jealous?”
This made her feel inexperienced and silly. “I think so. But, in fairness to me, I’ve kind of had a rough run, what with my husband cheating on me and all. The idea of being one in a string of people feels kind of painful right now.”
“Fair enough.”
“This doesn’t have to be anything. But I just want to know if it’s not. I don’t want it to be open-ended where we might do this again, but maybe you’ll be with other people. I can’t do that, not after everything. I feel like that’s probably not very modern dating of me.”
“I don’t need to sleep with anyone else. Whether or not it continues is kind of up to you.”
“Okay.” She wasn’t sure what she wanted. Not right now. Because that had been amazing, but this whole thing was also a little bit scary.
And she was just a girl.
“It feels weird to bring this up now, but the business ...”
He sat on the edge of the bed, hot chocolate in hand. “I don’t have a lot to do with daily operations—well, to be honest, I have nothing to do with them. I helped him get the business all set up, I invested a lot of capital in it, and I’ve been taking a cut of profits for years. I think he’s let things slip, do you agree?”
“Yes. Not just because I’m mad at him. Though I’d guess some of it was the stress of trying to keep that double life going for a while.”
“I hear those are tricky.”
“You don’t know?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never had the need for a double life. When I felt more and more like that was what being famous—and trying tostayfamous—asked of me, well, that was when I decided to be done.”
“I find that reassuring.”
