Page 13 of Wrong Number, Right Grumpy Bouncer

I don't.

I take my time with her, more time than either of us has patience for at first, mapping every inch the fabric's been hiding since she opened that door. Her skin's warm under my hands, softer than the photos in my head ever guessed at, and every sound she makes goes straight through me and settles somewhere I've been keeping locked up for years.

"You're staring," she breathes, when I slide both straps of the nightgown down her shoulders and just look at her for a second, cataloging every curve like it's information I need to survive on later.

"Can't help it." I press my mouth to her collarbone, feel her shiver under the touch. "Told you. Gorgeous."

I work my way down her quivering body, unhurried, deliberate, every stop along the way earning a gasp or a whispered version of my name that I intend to keep hearing for a long time. By the time I settle between her thighs, she's already trembling, already saying please in a voice that's lost every trace of the woman who once color-coded a spreadsheet for spite.

"Archer, I swear to God, if you're slow about this—"

"Wasn't planning on slow." I press a kiss to the inside of her thigh, feel her hips buck up in response, unable to help herself. "Was planning on thorough."

Thorough is exactly what I give her. I lick up her slit, avoiding the pleasure button she’s desperate for me to caress. She’s wet and moaning, making me growl as I can’t get enough of her taste. I’ll never get enough of her. I flatten my tongue and give her what she wants and swirl around her clit. She gasps. Her hands fist in the sheets, then in my hair, her back arching off the mattress, and I suck, lick, and caress her while I sink one finger and then two inside of her. She clasps them tightly and my cock swells to the hardest I can ever remember being in my life.

“Archer,” her voice climbs while her pussy pulses around my fingers. She’s almost there. She yells my name and turns it into something wordless and desperate. The single best sound I've heard in longer than I've had words for. Maya comes; it's fast and total, her whole body drawing tight and then shaking loose again, my name breaking apart on her lips like it's the only word she's got left.

I stay right where I am, licking her gently, keeping my fingers inside her, stroking softly until the last of it fades out of her, until her hand in my hair goes slack and her breathing settles into something almost human again.

"Well," she manages, once she's got enough air back to talk, staring up at the ceiling like it owes her an explanation. "There goes my whole plan for playing it cool."

I crawl up beside her, pull her against my chest, feel her heartbeat still going double time under my palm. "Didn't want cool," I tell her, meaning it more than I've meant most things I've said out loud in years. "Wanted this."

She turns into me, presses her smile against my jaw. "Good," she says. "Because I've got a whole night left."

Chapter Nine

Maya

He kisses me before I've even caught my breath, and I taste myself on his mouth, and my brain short-circuits in a way it has never once done for any man before this one.

This is new information. Filed under: things I didn’t expect to enjoy. I've never liked this fact about myself before, always managing a polite full-body flinch whenever it came up with my ex, like tasting my own pleasure on somebody's mouth was a chore to be endured rather than enjoyed. With Archer, it isn't a chore. It's proof. Proof that he was there, that he meant it, that every single second between his mouth and my thighs was about me and nothing else.

Nobody has ever made it just about me before. Not once. Not really.

"Hi," I say against his mouth, which is a stupid thing to say to a man who just did what he did to me, but my vocabulary has packed up and left the building along with the boldness I scrounged up earlier.

"Hi yourself." He pulls back enough to look at me, and there's something in his expression I don't have a spreadsheet column for yet, something that looks a lot like a man who just got what he wanted and isn't finished wanting more.

I need him. Not in the vague, theoretical, red-wine-and-fantasy way I've needed him for two weeks over text. Right now, immediately, no waiting period, no cooling-off clause. My hands are already moving toward his belt before my brain signs off on the decision, fumbling the buckle in a way that would embarrass me if I had any blood left above my collarbones to blush with.

"Slow down, Gorgeous." His hand covers mine, stilling it, and the low rasp of his laugh vibrates straight through my chest. "We've got all night."

"I prefer when you call me Spreadsheets." It comes out breathless and a little indignant, like I'm filing a formal complaint about nickname consistency in the middle of foreplay, which, to be fair, I am.

He laughs, real and easy, the sound filling up the whole room. "Is that so?" His thumb strokes over my knuckles once, slow. "Well. You are my gorgeous Spreadsheets."

"That's better." I try to sound authoritative about it. I don’t think it lands, given that I'm lying beneath him, still half undone, still very much not in charge of anything happening in this bedroom.

He climbs off the bed instead of letting me finish what I started, and for one horrified second I think he's leaving, some cruel bait and switch, but then he reaches for the hem of his own shirt and pulls it over his head in one unhurried motion, like he's got all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it just to watch my face while he does it. Then he loosens his belt, keeping his eyes on me as he drops his jeans and boxers.

I lose the ability to form a complete sentence.

I already knew he was big. Six foot three of broad shoulders and a chest I've spent days pretending not to think about since seeing him for the first time. Logically, I understood a man built like him would be proportionate everywhere else. Logic, it turns out, didn’t prepare me for the actual data.

"Okay." My voice comes out several octaves higher than intended. "Okay, that's, I don't think my hand fully wraps around that. That seems like a measurement issue. I feel like we should discuss ratios—"

He laughs again, low and wicked, enjoying my complete system failure a little too much. "Don't worry, Spreadsheets." He finishes undressing, unbothered, unhurried, watching the exact moment my brain gives up trying to run the numbers. "I'll fit. And it'll be good. Fuck that, it’ll be spectacular."