Big Rock

“Why?” I ask carefully, as those nimble, eager fingers inch closer. I’m en fuego. My neck is hot. My hair might be up in flames. I could melt polar caps right about now.

“Because I’m having a great time playing pretend with you,” she says, and her right breast presses against my arm. She’s so soft, and I’m dying to know what her breasts feel like in my hands, how she’d respond to my fingers tracing circles across the sensitive flesh, the noises she’d make when I suck a nipple into my mouth.

How hard her nipples get from my lips.

There I go again.

Exactly where I shouldn’t be.

Her fingers are not inches, not centimeters, but now millimeters from the outline of my dick.

I know what to do, and at the same time, I don’t have a clue. My instincts tell me the moves to make, how to touch, how to kiss, how to fuck. But it’s like a page from the playbook is missing. A whole damn chapter even. Because this is Charlotte, and our situation is beyond bizarre. We’re friends and business partners. We’re fake lovers who aren’t fucking. Yesterday, we were sober and practicing kissing, and tonight we were performing for an audience.

Now all bets are off. It’s just us, and yet we’re still touching.

Neither one of us is operating at top-notch brainpower, though. I’m tipsy, but she’s highly buzzed. That’s got to be where all this persistent contact is coming from. It’s like the bar is trying to seduce us, to weave its spell on us. It’s dark, and everyone around us is touching, arms around waists, hands in pockets, lips on neck. Gin Joint is pulsing with dirty thoughts. It’s beating with the promise of midnight, and sex after dark.

My breath flees my chest when her fingers touch my hard-on. Her eyes light up, like she’s opening a gift, and that’s exactly how I want a woman to feel, but precisely how Charlotte should not fucking feel.

“Charlotte,” I say, my voice a harsh warning.

“Spencer,” she whispers, her lips pouty and sexy as she lingers on the last letter. When she does that, all I can see is her lips on my cock, her blonde hair spilling across my legs, her head bobbing up and down. It’s a glorious image, and a goddamn dangerous one.

The tempo shifts again when she simply rests her head on my shoulder, and returns her hands to her lap.

Like she turned off the light switch.

“I just like hanging out with you,” she says, her eyes fluttering, like she’s sleepy.

“I like it, too,” I rasp out. “And you’re tired.”

“I know. Long day. My pillow is calling out to me.”

Great. Fucking great. I’m turned on, and she’s sliding into the snooze zone. Her hands have settled down, her touchy-feely side has subsided, and I’m left with a massive fucking erection, and my best friend’s sexy-as-sin body snuggled by my side on a velvet couch.

Fifteen minutes later, we get in a cab. I give the driver Charlotte’s address, because I want to make sure my happy, tipsy, tired friend gets home safely. After the word “Lexington” leaves my mouth, I turn to look at her, and everything happens in a wild blur.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


Her arms are around my neck and her mouth claims mine. She kisses me furiously, like a storm, a lightning storm of kisses raining down from the sky, bursting with heat and sparks and thunder.

She’s buzzed. I can feel it in the loose, languid way she moves, in the softness of her limbs, and in the panting in her breath. I taste gin on her lips, and the liquor has never tasted better in my life than when it’s mixed with Charlotte. Everything about her bombards my senses—her taste, her scent, her breath. I smell honey on her skin—she used honey blossom from that collection she showed me. Knowing this small detail about her, where this intoxicating scent comes from, makes the blood roar in my veins. Makes me want to know what she’ll smell like tomorrow. How she’ll taste the next day. When she gets out of the shower, what scent she’ll rub into her body, and whether it will drive me wild, too.

This honey smell is spectacular. Heady and bewitching and all her, and I know whatever she puts on the next day and the next will turn me on with the same raging intensity, because she is so fucking alluring.

Especially when she sucks on my lip like that. I groan and rope my arms around her, yanking her closer. She’s climbed up on me, straddling me in the back of the cab as it slings us up the avenue, the lights of late-night Manhattan whipping by.

She says my name again on a smoky moan. It sounds like an orgasm as it leaves her red lips. “Spencer. I want you,” she whispers in my ear. “You got me so wet from that kiss yesterday. I’m so wet right now, too. Everything you do turns me on.”

Oh God. Oh hell. Oh, fucking save me from myself.