For the last three days, I’d been expecting her at the winery with a mixture of dread and anticipation. Each night, I’d come home feeling grateful that she hadn’t shown up and yet still wishing she had. Because even though I knew nothing could happen, I liked being around her. I missed talking to her. I missed her face. I missed the way it felt to do nice things for a woman I was attracted to.

I was trying to do what Lucas had said, give both Sylvia and I some breathing room, but I hadn’t stopped thinking of her for a minute.

My heartbeat quickened as I switched off the television and walked from the couch to the front door, my mind a jumble of questions. If it was Sylvia, what did it mean that she was knocking at my door at nine o’clock on a Saturday night? Did she still want to be just friends? If I invited her in, could I be trusted to keep my hands to myself? It seemed like a bad sign that I wasn’t sure.

I unlocked the door and pulled it open.

“Hi,” she said breathlessly. She wore a long wool coat buttoned all the way up, and her legs were bare below the knee. On her feet she wore high heels, the same ones she’d worn on Christmas Eve. Her hair was done like it had been on Christmas Eve too, and she was wearing the perfume—the one I’d told her never to wear around me. Snowflakes clung to her coat and hair.

Right away I assumed she’d been out at a party or something, and jealousy kicked me in the gut. What I wouldn’t give to see her across the room at some function and be able to walk over and introduce myself. Get to know her without so many fucking complications. Tell her she took my breath away and kiss her until she lost hers.

“Can I come in?” she asked.

I realized I had been standing there staring at her, and she was out in the cold. “Oh—sorry. Yes.” I opened the door and stood back as she entered, then shut the door behind her.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Okay.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “You?”

“Terrible.” She started to unbutton her coat.

“Terrible?” I frowned. “Where were you tonight?”

“Home alone. The kids are sleeping at Mack and Frannie’s. My parents are out.”

Confused, I glanced at her high heels. “You were home alone?”

“Yeah. And I couldn’t stop thinking about you.” She finished with the buttons and clutched the coat together at her chest.

My cock twitched. Was she fucking naked under there? “You couldn’t?”

“No. And it made me realize something.”

“What’s that?”

“I want to break the rules.” She opened the coat and let it fall to the floor.

My jaw dropped. She wasn’t naked.

She was wearing the red dress.

“I want to touch you,” she said, her eyes locked on mine. “I want to hear you tell me I’m beautiful. I want you to misbehave.”

“Sylvia,” I said, working very hard to keep my cool. “Do you know what you’re saying?”

“Yes.” She began slowly walking backward down the hall.

I followed her like a predator stalking its prey. “Have you been drinking?”

“Not a drop.”

“Are you under the influence of drugs?”

She shook her head.

“Am I dreaming right now?”

She stopped moving, allowing me to get close enough for her to reach out and put a hand on my dick, which was thick and hard under my jeans. “Am I?”

I grabbed her by both wrists and pushed her up against the hallway wall, pinning her arms above her head. “I’m going to give you one chance to come to your senses, Sylvia.”

“And if I don’t?” She strained against me, pressing her breasts into my chest.

I put my lips at her ear. “Then I’m going to spend the rest of the night doing very bad things to your body.”

“Do them,” she whispered. “I’m begging you, Henry. Do them.”

Hearing my name on her lips like that—hearing her beg—flipped a switch in me. I was done asking permission, done worrying about whether this was right or wrong, done trying to talk her out of something I so desperately wanted—no, needed—to do.

I crushed my lips to hers, plunging my tongue into her mouth. My hands moved down her body, along curves covered in red, and I wanted nothing more than to tear that dress from her skin with my teeth.

But first I had to taste her.

Dropping to my knees, I shoved her dress up her hips and reached for her underwear—except she wasn’t wearing any.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered, the bulge in my jeans growing even bigger. “You knew what you wanted when you came here tonight, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, breathing hard. “So don’t stop.”

I lifted one high-heeled foot and kissed the inside of her ankle. Her calf. Her knee. I placed it over my shoulder and kissed my way up her inner thigh.

She flattened her hands on the wall beside her and gasped as I put my mouth on her pussy, stroking up the warm, slick center with my tongue, lingering at the top. I moaned at her sweet taste, at her velvet-and-satin texture, at the irresistible scent of her. I teased her clit with the tip of my tongue, and reveled in the way she moved her hips, and put her hands on my head, and tightened her leg against my back, pulling me in closer. She panted and sighed and murmured incomprehensible words of pleasure and disbelief. The leg she stood on trembled.

“I’m so close,” she whispered, and I sensed something like fear in her voice, almost like she was afraid her orgasm wasn’t going to happen. “Don’t give up.”

Give up? Was she fucking serious? Why would I give up? It made me wonder if her husband was an even bigger asshole than I’d previously thought.

But half a second later, he was out of my head.

I slipped one hand between her legs and slid one finger easily inside her, then two, searching for the spot that would put her over the edge. I knew I’d found it when her body tensed up and I felt her muscles contracting around my fingers.

“Henry,” she said, almost frantically. “My God, it’s going to happen. It’s going to fucking happen, and it’s been . . . so . . . long.”

Beneath my tongue, her clit was firm and swollen and I sucked it into my mouth, flicking it with quick, hard strokes. She cried out repeatedly, her fingers fisting tightly in my hair, her entire body going stiff except for the rhythmic pulse of her orgasm around my fingers.

Fuck, it felt good to make a woman come, to know that I was giving her that kind of pleasure, to hear her sounds and taste her desire and see her bare before me. To touch her and kiss her and fuck her with my tongue just because I wanted to. And because she wanted me to. She wanted it so badly she’d come here in high heels and a red dress with no panties underneath.

And that wasn’t all she wanted.

“Come here,” she panted when she could talk again, yanking on my shirt.

I rose to my feet and she reached for my belt. “I want to get my hands on you,” she said against my lips. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

I groaned as she undid my jeans and slid her hand inside, wrapping her fingers around my cock. Fuck, it had been too long—if she kept working me with her hand like that, I was going to lose control and come all over her fingers.