“Whoa, we’re going to need those for what I have planned tonight, so careful where you put that knee, sweetheart.” He chuckled at the expression on her face, half pissed, half aroused.
“W-what do you have planned? You don’t want to stop?” she asked timidly, her vacillating mood softening every part of him.
Well, nearly every part.
Sean tipped her chin up, catching the crystal blue of her gaze. “Doyouwant to stop?”
“No.” She resolutely shook her head. “No, I don’t. I want to have sex. Lots of sex. Lots of casual, no-strings sex. With you.”
For him, it was way too late for the no strings part. He had strings all over the damn place that he craved to tie to her strings with neat little double-knotted bows that never snapped. But apparently, she was still on the friends-with-benefits train, and he was starting to understand why. So, he wouldn’t call his own bluff yet.
“Okay then. Sex it is. But I have one more condition.”
Ivy inhaled deeply, then squared her shoulders like a soldier preparing for battle. This wasn’t turning out to be the romantic evening he had in mind.
“Okay. What is it? But I tell you this right now—no bondage. I need—” Her eyes flitted back and forth. “I don’t want to be tied down.”
Strange that she went there with him. Did he look like a bondage sort of guy? He didn’t want to tie her down so much as he wanted to…connect himself to her.
“Understood,” he said, matching her business-like tone. “But that wasn’t my condition.”
“What is it then? I’m on the pill, but I have condoms in the bedroom. And I’ve been checked.”
Holy fuck, what was this, a business merger? Did this woman know anything about romance? Seduction? The answer slugged him in the gut. It’d been robbed from her, along with her confidence and desire, after whatever had happened to her.
“I’ve been checked too, and never have sex without protection, and haven’t had it at all in—well, too damn long,” he admitted. Not since he’d moved in across from her, that was for sure.
Anytime he’d been with a woman since he’d met Ivy, he’d never experienced any genuine fulfillment. His body might have been sated but his soul was still hungry. As though what he’d been doing was right, but with the wrong person. Eventually, he stopped altogether, because it wasn’t his body that needed satisfying.
“So, what then?” She fisted her hands at her hips, looking irritated.
“If you’d let me get a word in, I’ll tell you that my condition is that this first time, between you and me, right here, right now, you lead.”
Ivy blinked up at him, as if slowly letting the information compute in her brain. “I lead?”
“Yes. You say what and when. You make all the moves. Whatever you want, how far you want, how fast you want. You’re in the driver’s seat. You controleverythingthat happens tonight.”
Because regardless of the details he was missing, one thing was clear: control had been taken from her before, and tonight she was getting it back.
“I don’t know how to be in the driver’s seat,” she said, sounding a little stunned.
“You do know, Ivy,” he reassured her. “You know what to do by how you feel. Let that guide you.”
She continued to stare at him blankly, so he moved to the kitchen, because maybe she did need prompting.
“Where do you keep the candles?” he asked, opening random cabinets.
“Candles?”
“Yeah, you know, the waxy things that have little strings that light up if you hold a match to them.”
That got her attention. She stomped over to him, shoved him out of the way, reached up to a cupboard she could barely touch, and took down a couple of stubby off-white candles.
“I know what a candle is, genius. Why do you want them?”
He picked the candles out of her hands and pressed a kiss to her lips. “To set the mood.” Then, because he loved that smart mouth, he kissed it again. “So, where do you want me?”
She gazed up at him, a little dazed. The look he loved best because he knew he’d put it there with his kisses, and he almost dropped the candles and pulled her in for another one, one that didn’t end until they were both panting and spent, except that didn’t exactly align with his earlier declaration that she lead, so he stayed focused on his task.
