“Fooling around is great, and super low risk if you have boundaries. Just let him know it’s playing around and nothing more. Get this sexual energy out of your system, then you can go back to business as usual, until you’re ready to boink again,” she says, setting the orbs in the cart.
I groan. “Please, not boink. I don’t want toboink.”
“Fine,” she says with a leer. “Take him to pound-town. Show him your bone-zone. Let him grind his axe in your guts.”
“Ew, please,” I whisper, clenching my eyes shut as I try not to envision him axing my guts.
“Come on, Cait! You read smut! I’ve seen your book stack,” she says.
“Yes but, that’s fiction!”
“It could be reality,” she says, pulling the cart by the front.
She guides us to the back of the huge building where the furniture is arranged like faux sitting rooms. There are a few good pieces that I take pictures of as we go by. There’s even a beautiful, antique chaise. I lift one end of it and confirm it’s super heavy, made of real wood. I run my hand over the fabric and feel the fresh, velvety fibers tickling my palm. It’s blood-red, with dark wood polish, and absolutely gorgeous.
I grab the tag fluttering off the back and flip it toward me. “A hundred!” I shout, elated.
“Is that too much?” Renee asks.
I grin. “No, it’s awesome!”
“Yay! Rip off the bottom of the tag, that signifies it’s spoken for,” she says.
I tear off the end where the barcode is and stuff it in my pocket.
“Thanks for bringing me out to do this.”
“Of course!” She pats my shoulder affectionately. “The boys are fine on their own. Probably talking about how Bastian can get even bigger biceps, sleeping routines, creatine, etcetera.”
I snicker. “He seems really passionate.”
“He is. And so driven,” she says, her black-rimmed eyes practically going starry.
“And you?” I ask.
She smiles. “I love running the inn. I get to meet new people, bartend and listen to my favorite tunes while shooting pool. We go out on the lake when it hits the mid-sixties and do some fishing—mostly catch and release. Anyway, it’s slow and I like it slow. There’s peace in every day, and I want for nothing.”
I nod. “Sounds perfect.”
“Stop trying to deflect from the subject at hand,” she says, leading me to a rug that’s hideous.
We both cringe down at it, then at each other, and laugh.
“I’m not deflecting,” I say. “I’m just trying to get to know you better.”
“While avoiding the idea of having sex with Bastian,” she says bluntly, and my brain latches onto the words.
He’s looming over me, his claws digging into the door frame as his hips slap against mine. The look on his face is pure bliss, sending a surge of heat to my core.
I shake my head. “What if he doesn’t even want to have sex with me? He said many women tried to seduce him and he turned most of them down.”
She rolls her eyes. “Hejizzedon you.”
An older woman gasps nearby and when we both look at her, she hurries away, her cheeks red. We share another laugh.
“I’m just saying, it’s pretty obvious he’d be into fooling around,” she says as we move on to lamps.
Just fooling around…
