“Wanna have another go?”
I smirk. I can’t help it. I know she means another guess, but…“I haven’t had a first go…yet.”
She blinks those big, sexy gray eyes and then she smiles. It’s wide, it’s deep and it’s full of suggestion. She starts to speak, but before anything comes out Sara is back holding a bottle of pink champagne. “Found it! Last bottle.”
She starts to uncork it, smiling so brightly at me I want to squint. I turn my attention back to Emerald Dress. She looks at the champagne and realizes I must be getting a drink for someone else. I can see the thought skitter across her expression. She doesn’t like it. I like that she doesn’t like it. But before I can explain it’s for my sister, she announces, “I should go. Excuse me.”
I watch her tight little ass swing back and forth under the silky material as she saunters off down a hall to the left of the main room where everyone is gathered.
Chapter 2
Shayne
I can convince myself that whole thing with the tall, dark stranger in the perfectly fitted midnight blue suit was no big deal for about fifteen minutes. I act like it didn’t happen while I check to make sure the saunas are pristine. I pretend it was just a casual conversation while making sure the women’s changing room is immaculate and the showers are sparkling. I blame the bottle of wine Audrey made me split with her at her apartment while we got ready for my overreacting to the mild flirtation. But by the time I get to the men’s changing room I can’t ignore the dampness in my thong or the way my heart is still beating furiously.
Apparently I’m not the only one who was moved by the encounter, because the door flies open and my best friend, Audrey, is standing there with her hands on her slim hips and her big brown eyes blinking at me furiously. “That guy you were talking to is sex personified.”
I smile. “Tell me about it.”
“I heard him talking to someone earlier, and he’s French, which is sexy as fuck. He’s got that whole smoldering thing going on with those intense blue eyes—which, by the way, have been glued to your fine ass all night. And I do mean your ass. Your actual butt. He’s checking you out, in case you were wondering. And don’t even get me started on—”
I raise my hand to silence her. “I didn’t mean you should actually tell me about it. Trust me, I know,” I tell her as I glance into the showers to make sure they’re pristine, and that no one is in there eavesdropping. Trey will be giving informal tours of the facilities as the evening progresses, and I want everything perfect. “Between you and me, he was hitting buttons inside me I didn’t even know existed.”
“Who the hell is he, anyway?” Audrey asks, walking over to the mirror and fluffing her long perfectly coiffed dirty blond hair. “I saw him talking with a bunch of other suits before the bar encounter, but I didn’t recognize any of them. Except they’re all hot.”
“Trey was inviting the local businesses in the area, which include law firms, an accounting firm and a couple investment bankers and the staff at the fancy restaurant in the building next door. He must be one of them,” I say absently and try not to think of that jolt of electricity that I felt when his fingers slid over mine as I passed him his drink. “If he’s a lawyer I needed to get myself in legal trouble ASAP.”
“Yeah, you do.” Audrey winks at me. “Shayne, you have to go back out there and talk to him.”
“Easy now, slugger.” I laugh but…I’m shocked at how much I actually want to. It was embarrassing, really. I’d never had such an instant and overwhelming reaction to a guy before.
My friend Audrey had. More than once. When we were in college she could go from zero to hot-and-heavy make-out session with a guy she had met fifteen minutes earlier. Shortly after we moved to Seattle, Audrey met her current boyfriend, Josh, and her wild days were over.
Josh is a great guy and I’ve never seen Audrey happier, but now she is hellbent on living vicariously through me. My unfortunate sex drought seems to upset her way more than it does me. Every time we go out for a girl’s night she tries to convince me to flirt with some random guy. It is hysterical and annoying. One-night stands are so not my thing. But then again I don’t exactly want celibacy to be my thing either.
Audrey said I liked to keep one foot on firm ground and that I’d never taken risks or leaps. Audrey’s middle name was leap. From the moment we met in the dorm bathrooms in freshman year at Syracuse University, I both envied her and judged her. I’d never met anyone with a messier life. Not even my brother, Trey, who has battled addiction issues, had as crazy a life as Audrey. Of course, if she wasn’t impulsive, she wouldn’t be here in Seattle with me. When I graduated college we’d gotten an apartment together in Syracuse and both started working. A year later I decided to move back here to help my brother start his business, and she agreed to come with me. It was nowhere near her home or family—they were in New Hampshire—and it was nowhere near anywhere she’d ever lived before, but she didn’t even blink. She just loaded her shit into my Kia Soul and hopped into the passenger seat with a smile.
“I bet your vagina has cobwebs,” Audrey announces with a sad expression, and I roll my eyes. “Do you even remember how to have sex?”
“I’m sure it’s like riding a bike,” I snark back.
“Test your theory.” Audrey is the only person I know who can trump my snarkiness with her own. “Ridehim.”
I shake my head at her like she’s an incorrigible puppy, but as I think about how this night has gone…I have to admit I want to. Watching him watch me from across the room and then swapping innuendos felt like foreplay. It made my skin tingle and my heart race and the long-dormant space between my thighs comes to life. I might actually even masturbate tonight. I haven’t bothered to do that in…months. I blush at the thought.
“What’re the red cheeks for?” Audrey inquires and then claps excitedly. “Oh! You want to do it! You want to sleep with him!”
“Of course I do. He’s delicious,” I confess, and it makes her clap again. “But I won’t.”
Audrey sighs dramatically. “Come on, Shayne! Live a little!”
“I live just fine.”
“Nuns get more action than you,” she retorts, and I laugh. Then she digs into her purse and pulls out a tiny, square foil packet. She shoves it at me, and I take a step back like she’s trying to hand me a tarantula.
“Take it. In case you change your mind,” she urges, and I look at the condom, horrified. She rolls her big brown eyes and presses it into my palm.
I open the door to leave the changing room, planning to throw the condom into the closest trash can I find, and come to face-to-face with my future masturbation material. He stops, but not as quickly as he could, or should. I know he sees me as soon as I see him, which is about two feet away in the narrow hallway, but he keeps walking toward me. He doesn’t stop until he’s basically towering above me, his wall of a chest almost touching me. I can’t help taking a step back, but his hand goes to my elbow like he’s holding me in place so my step falters and I stay wedged up against him. I cover the silver packet in my hand with my fingers to hide it from him.
