CHALLENGE ACCEPTED
BRYS
I jolt awake, eyes flying open, and my heart crashing in my chest.
For a moment, I'm utterly discombobulated; I know I'm not at home, but where am I?
Lying on a man's chest, his heart thudding gently under my ear, his hand slung over my hip to rest on my lower belly.
But…I broke up with Charles.
Which means this isn't Charles.
Charles is a wonderful man. He's smart, successful, kind, driven, and handsome. Our breakup was mutual and relatively painless—as much as a breakup can be—because we simply realized we weren't compatible, romantically. We're excellent friends, we're supportive of each other, and we’re happy to celebrate each other's successes, but our competitive, Type-A, hard-charging personalities just do not mesh romantically. The sex was hot and cold, also. It was either passionate and quick or lackluster and performative. There was no in-between.
I can honestly say without any prevarication or pretense that Charles is one of my nearest and dearest friends. That said, I do sometimes think that perhaps Charles may, deep down, still harbor some kind of feelings for me. My position on that topicis to ignore it and hope it never comes up, because that ship has long since sailed and shall never return to harbor.
Since that breakup, I've been far too busy with work to date. I did scratch the itch, so to speak, with a hunky young buck from the temp pool—he brought me my coffee and mail for a few weeks, and shot me white-toothed grins and flexed his gigantic, rippling, twenty-four-year-old biceps at me. I rewarded his valiant, if rather obvious, attempts at flirtation and seduction with a couple of brief but satisfying after-hours trysts in my office. I have a standing brunch date with several other high-ranking female execs, one of whom runs the temp agency that supplies my office with grunt-work drones, which made it easy enough to make sure Shawn F. got assigned elsewhere on the down-low without him being any the wiser. It's best for everyone that way, you see. No point in making anything awkward for the guy; he was nice, pleasing to look at—especially naked—and fun to fool around with a couple of times to relieve the tension, but that's all it was going to ever be, and I just don't have time for that conversation, so I had Alicia finesse his assignments away from my office.
Such is the train of my thoughts as I lie with my cheek on Jakob's firm, bare chest. And my god, what a chest it is. For a man who must be nearer fifty than forty, he's in better shape than twenty-four-year-old Shawn F., and that's really saying something. Shawn F. is only moonlighting as an office temp while his career as a fitness influencer takes off, or so he said… repeatedly. The sexy young lad did have a set of abs so deliciously sharp and shredded you could cut your finger on them, you might think.
Jakob is built differently. His shoulders are broad and thick, his chest is dense and hard—it isn't the bulging, rounded chest of a bodybuilder, but the flat, hard-as-steel chest of someone whose fitness is functional versus aesthetic. His abs are defined,certainly, but they're thick and hard blocky rather than ridged and sharp.
His arms are thick and dense.
His thighs are corded with muscle.
I feel my cheeks flaming as I think about the far-too-brief glimpse of his body I got last night before he collapsed into bed and promptly passed out.
Tight black boxer-briefs left very, very little to the imagination—his bulge was prominent, the outline of his penis pressed clearly against the stretchy material…and imprinted vividly on my brain.
Shawn F. was several months ago, and while I may cultivate the reputation of being a cold, hard, demanding, sharp-tongued, venomously sarcastic ice queen to my employees, I am an intensely sexual woman. I need sex regularly, and I haven't had any in so long my vagina is considering a permanent shuttering of the offices, so to speak.
The tension within me is intolerable.
Jakob is ferociously attractive. Those glittering, hard, cold brown eyes that pierce and scrutinize, razor-sharp with intelligence, boiling with cunning. Thick, black hair perfectly and expensively cut, and even the silver at his temples does something to me.
His body.
His hands.
But more than anything, it’s the mystery of him that has my attention. His arrogance—confidence, yes; the inevitable assurance of self that comes from being the master of all you survey, yes. But it's also just arrogance.
And it's hot.
Mainly because so far, he's proven that he can back the arrogance up with action.
Being defended and protected is sexy.
I know, I know: I wouldn't need protection in the first place if it weren’t for him, but I also recognize that it wasn’t his fault I got sucked into his orbit; it was pure chance.
Jakob shifts beneath me, making a small, soft, growly noise in his throat that is oddly endearing. His shifting rolled me against his chest, and his hand slips away from my belly and rests on my thigh.
I'm in my T-shirt and panties, because I can't sleep in jeans. Which means his hand is hot and rough against my bare thigh. My stomach tightens and my heart pitter-patters.
It's nothing, I tell myself. But it doesn't feel like nothing. It feels like I'm being held by a strong, powerful, attractive man who has literally killed to protect me; that's not nothing.
I rub my nose. Stretch and yawn; Jakob remains asleep through my yawning and stretching. The yawn is prodigious, the kind where you shudder, and something flutters in your eardrums, the world goes black, and a frisson of energy ripples through you, leaving you momentarily helpless and spastic. My hand, as the yawn ends, comes to rest on his belly. My eyes open and roam his bare chest. I like the coarse black body hair coating his chest and abs. It's masculine. Speaks of brawn and power and a lack of concern for the opinions of others. This is a man with no time for shaving or waxing for aesthetic purposes, and to me, that's sexy.
