“No . . . I want it.”

The tumbler was pulled from my hand and dropped haphazardly down onto the desk. Jensen picked me up, my legs came around his waist, and he was above me, working his body over mine in barely another breath.

He ground against me, impatient as he found a rhythm, his mouth covering mine, lips sucking, tongue sliding inside. He groaned, pulling my leg higher up his waist. “I’ve been hard for hours.”

God, I could come like this.

I had, just last night.

His cock just there, between my legs, so right, shifting harder and faster, his breath hot on my neck, quiet grunts freer now, as if he were a sweater and I’d tugged a loose thread and now he was slowly unraveling.

“I don’t want to come like this,” I managed from beneath him. “I want—”

I’d have to check later to see whether my shirt was torn or whether it was just a stitch ripping loudly through the room as he pulled it off me. He peeled my trousers and underpants off in a long, determined tug. His own shirt came off with a hand reaching backward, grabbing a fistful of cotton, and yanking it forward, pulling his hair with it into his eyes.

Fevered hands pushed his pants down, fumbling in his suitcase for a condom, and the tear of the foil seemed to crackle through the room.

The wet slide of it, the feel of him pulling me over him, holding his cock for me to take in . . .

And when I did, we both went silent in that gasping, aware moment. He was staring up at my face, and I felt so entirely naked above him, in a way that I really hadn’t before in any of my quick drunk fumblings or under-the-covers rutting. My sex life before seemed so . . . obvious compared to this, and even though Mark was older than Jensen by a number of years, he’d never seemed this assured, this mature, this . . . experienced.

His hands cupped my hips, helping me find a rhythm, and I was so overwhelmed by it all that I couldn’t really focus, couldn’t get into the headspace I needed, where I could just let go and have at him. But he seemed to get it, sitting up beneath me and finally breaking that quiet habit of his to tell me how it felt for him, how warm, and his hand came between us, touching me for the first time ever like this, pressing and patient. I wanted to apologize, in a silly burst; I felt so foolish that my body was so distracted by the reality of it that I couldn’t focus on the pleasure, but he didn’t even seem to care.

Slowly, slowly, he worked me over, kissing me and touching me and praising until something clicked inside, some track sliding into place. It turned from self-conscious, awestruck desire into focused pleasure—and it was obliterating, pleasure so good it was nearly numbing, my orgasm tearing through me before I realized how loud I’d been, how frantic, with nails digging into his back and my neck arched away, face tilted toward the ceiling.

He rolled us so he was above me now, watching where our bodies came together as he slid back inside. His eyes traveled the path to my face, and only once he was looking at me did he begin moving again.

“You good?” he whispered.

I nodded, but the truth was, I wasn’t good. Not at all. I was slowly losing my bloody mind.

This wasn’t what a fling should be. He wasn’t casual, forgettable. He wasn’t flaky or flippant. He was attentive, he was considerate, and—holy fuck—he seemed more committed to spending time with me than he was to sleeping, to eating, even to finding closure with Becky. It was almost as if this was what he wanted.

But only temporarily.

Wanting to somehow encode his body on my hands, I ran my palms down the definition of his back, across the firm curve of his backside, and forward—feeling the muscular shifting of his hips.

Up his stomach. Over his chest.

My arms went up then, snaking around his neck and urging his body back onto mine.

He came down to me with a smile, his lips meeting mine briefly, sweetly, before he pressed his face to my neck and gave in to the genuine fucking his body needed.

His chest slid across me, up and back, up and back, his breath a rise and drop of warm, bursting air on my neck.

Speeding up, he exhaled a sharp grunt, his hand smoothing down my side to pull my leg higher, to push in deeper, to work himself inside me. It was the only thing I could possibly notice—how it turned for him from good to necessary, how his body hit a place of no return and he was grunting with every breath, and finally tensing beneath my hands with a long, rough groan.

The sound of it echoed in my ear, seeming to settle gently around us.

Sex.

We’d had sex.

Good sex. Not just good but . . . real.

And he didn’t roll off me, didn’t immediately retreat.

His mouth pressed warm, small kisses along my neck to my jaw, until it met mine and we kissed, mouths open to catch our breath, wordless.

I don’t know what I would have done with a man like Jensen back in my real life.

Would I have even been able to let him in? Or would I have been all chatter and booze, jokes and chaos? Would he even have looked at me, with my every-colored hair, vibrant bird tattoo, and wildly bright skirts?

No, I thought. There were no other circumstances under which a man like Jensen would look twice at a woman like me. And even if he had, I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what to do with his attention.

I sat up, jerked from sleep.

The room was dark and I assumed it was still the black of night, but I had no real sense of the time: at some point, Jensen must have gotten up and closed every layer of curtains to build a dark, warm fortress.

I hoped I’d been daintily curled on my side, nose-breathing like a lady. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the most delicate sleeper.