“No. Really, we can just skip the oral satisfaction tonight.”
“Take those panties off, or I’m going to spank you, Vivian. And you’re not ready for that. Not if you want to get to work on time this week and sit still behind that cute little desk.”
He wouldn’t spank me if I didn’t want him to, but the threat of it got to me. I unhooked the garter belt.
He undid the string on the envelope.
I got the straps off the tops of my stockings.
He took out a shiny silver straight razor.
“Don’t you have a safety razor like a normal person?”
“If I can do my face, I can do you. Come on.” He patted the counter. “Get up here.”
I hesitated. He picked me up and plopped me on the vanity.
“Lean back.”
I was frozen. Simply frozen. One that he’d be so close to my most sensitive parts. His face. His eyes. Observing it so intently. Two, that he’d have a blade.
But his expression didn’t give an inch. Trust him or not. Surrender to doing things I’d never done before, just for a little while, or walk out.
Before I could do anything, he put his hands on either side of my face and brushed his lips with mine. “I want you to be comfortable, and I’ll make you uncomfortable to do it. I still promise you I’m going to make this as good as it can be.”
“I know.” My voice barely worked. “We’re just breaking through three comfort zones at a time. I feel off-balance.”
He leaned back, stuck the knife in his teeth, and picked up a mug and brush. “We are. Don’t make me go for the home run.” He said it around the blade, and it was as sexy as anything I’d seen.
He put a little water in the mug and swirled the brush around, still biting the knife like a savage. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, still in his button-down shirt and jacket, me nearly naked before him.
He put the knife to the side. “Come on. Open your legs.”
I couldn’t breathe. I relaxed my legs but didn’t open them. He did it with the slightest pressure between my knees. He inspected the softest, most vulnerable part of me. The ugliest part. The part where all the shame lived. My lungs got very small, and the insides of my legs tingled as if I were in free fall.
“Do you remember in Eternal Joke?” He drew his hand across my belly, down to the tuft of blond hair. “That scene where Captain Gastronome is on the Aegean?”
I flicked the mental pages of the book. There were a hundred barely connected stories in it. “The one that made me seasick? Yeah.”
He put the brush below my navel. It was soft and cool running down, down to where I couldn’t feel the touch of the brush against my skin anymore.
“Do you think he knew his wife was below decks, fucking what’s-his-name?”
He lathered me from clit to navel. My excitement came from inside, more at the idea of his attention than the touch of the soap.
“I think he only loved the sea.”
“Until he caught them.” Dash crouched down, razor in hand. “Then he loved her again. Because he’d lost control of her.”
“He was such an ass. Honestly. I hated him.”
The razor touched the line where the hair started, scratching the skin harmlessly.
“You’re hard on the guy. He had a club foot, you know. I can barely stand upright on a boat deck with two good feet.”
I couldn’t look. Between Dash’s inspection and the sight of the sharp edge, I was compelled to jump ten feet. If I did, the bloody gash and the ruined evening wouldn’t be his fault. The flat white ceiling was about to become my entertainment.
“No one asked him to be a ship’s captain.”
“Ouch,” he said, and inside I jumped a little because I thought he’d cut me.
I looked down, and all I saw was my near-hairless body and Dash Wallace an inch from my *, attention laser-focused.
“You don’t give a disabled veteran an inch.”
“He loved the sea more than his wife! And he told her to her face. What is that even? Who says something like that?”
His eyes flicked to mine. Was the blue warmer than it had been? Or was I seeing them differently? “She loved him for it.”
I straightened and put my finger up to make a point. “She fell in love with his sea-captain-ness. But that’s not sustainable. A girl can’t sit on the bench while the sea’s up to bat all the time.”
When his body jerked with a laugh, I shifted a little out of fear he’d cut me. But he wasn’t even close, and the laughter was so beautiful and real that my fear disappeared in a poof of my own delight.
“You’re right.” His attention went back between my legs. “I must have been caught up in the way he compared the color of the sea to wine.”
“Storm is burgundy; calm is chianti.”
“And us, the incompetent waiter’s cork bobbing.”
I laughed again because the passages were funny and the connection with Dash tickled my heart.
“Stay still now,” he said. “Just a little more.” He waved the knife.
I wanted to laugh, but I was trying not to move. Stillness was hard enough with blood screaming to the surface of my * as if getting three nanometers closer to him would get me off.