Page 8 of Baby for My Ex's Brother

“Before we go further. Yes.”

This is, I recognize dimly, both considerate and tactically efficient, but also really inconvenient to my libido. The man’s asking me to think after he took away my thoughts.

Bad timing. But probably necessary.

I’ve done research. I’ve had late nights on the internet and one very illuminating conversation with Cherry that she swore to take to her grave. I know what I want totry. The question has always been opportunity, and opportunity is currently looking at me in an elevator, his jacket on the camera, his full and undivided attention on my answer.

“I don’t know what I like.”

He straightens and frowns. “You were with Hugo for three years—you’re not a virgin somehow, are you?”

“Not since Evan Grimes’ basement in tenth grade. What I mean is, I don’t know what I like because I’ve never had the chance to figure it out. A lot of guys… they don’t know what they’re doing, or they don’t want to experiment, because they know what gets them off, and they think that should be good enough for the girl they’re doing it to?—”

“Don’t you mean, doing itwith?”

I laugh. Cackle, really. My energy is all over the place, and that’s such an innocent question for someone who looks like him. “No. I meant doing itto. Most guys don’t see a woman as a participant. They see her as the person they won or the person they get to fuck… if they see her as a person at all.”

He considers this. “Then it sounds like you wish to experiment.”

I swallow. “Yes.”

“In what realm do you mean?”

I did not drive across the city in four-inch heels to be coy about it now. “Kink. Bondage, spanking, blindfolds, all that stuff.”

His eyebrow goes up. A quarter of an inch, maybe less, but I catch it. He looks at me for a moment with something that isn’t quite a smile but is the closest relative of one. Then he leans closer, pressing his forehead to mine. His fingers slide beneath the edge of my underwear. “I accept your proposal.”

I stop thinking about his eyebrow.

His fingers are as certain as the rest of him, unhurried, reading me with a focus that makes the rest of the world—the elevator,the hotel, the wedding we just left, Hugo and his fuming and his terrible face—reduce to a very faint signal behind a very loud frequency.

I press back against the wall and grip his forearm. He watches my face the entire time, which should feel like too much, but instead feels like exactly the right amount of everything.

The elevator stops.

We both go still. His hand doesn’t move. The doors open onto an empty corridor, and we look out, and the doors slide shut again.

He hits the button for the penthouse.

“You live on the top floor?” My voice is impressively level, given everything.

“I do.”

“How many floors up?”

“Several.”

His fingers resume their work on my clit, and I begin to shake. His mouth devours mine, and I’m not sure which way is up anymore. All I know is this man. This mouth. Those fingers.

I’m on the edge when the elevator opens onto his private landing. My fingers grip his arm so tightly that it’s an effort to pry them loose. He unlocks the door with the ease of a man who’s not remotely affected, which is either composure or an extremely effective illusion of it, and I have not yet decided which.

The penthouse is large, dark-toned, expensive, with the whole of Chicago glittering through floor-to-ceiling windows as ifarranged there specifically for the view. It smells like him. Leather.

I get approximately four seconds of impression before his hands find me again.

He walks me backward through it, unhurried, mouth at my temple, my cheek, the corner of my jaw, while his hand find the zipper at the back of my dress. The dress hits the floor somewhere near the living room. His shirt follows, and I finally get my hands on him properly, discovering the scars on his face and hands are not the only ones.

His body is a map of a life I know almost nothing about, and I trace the edge of a scar along his ribs and feel him go still beneath my fingers.