“Last time you imbued yourself upon me, you claimed it was because the third time was a charm.” My hips straddled him as I sat up, taking control as I rubbed myself against him. “What’s your excuse this time?”
“Fourth time’s just for fun.” His hands curled into my hips as he stared down at me sliding against him. His smile folded into a smirk when he saw his steel wet and shiny from my body’s arousal. “Just for fucking fun.”
“Are you using that as the verb or the adjective?” When his brows came together, I explained, “Are we supposed to have fun fucking, or have a fucking fun time? There’s a difference, so how do you mean it?”
He tipped my hips, positioning himself. “I’ll show you how I mean it. If you have any questions after, feel free to voice them then.” When he pushed into me, my cry filled the apartment. “If you have any voice left when I’m done with you.”
Just as I was almost seated over his lap, a hard knock sounded at the door.
Our faces went blank as we must have both arrived at the same conclusion as to who it might have been.
Soren relaxed a second after. “My mom’s out of town for the weekend with some girlfriends. It’s not her.”
“Thank god,” I breathed, sliding off him. The look he gave me as I did reminded me again how much power I had over him. Especially when it was my body doing the talking. “Two-minute intermission.”
He sat up and reached for his sweats. As he tugged them on, he looked like a child who’d just been told they wouldn’t get dessert for a month.
“Why am I answering the door again?” he asked when he glanced at me trying to untangle the covers to throw over myself.
I answered with a shrug.
His groan echoed into the room as whatever he must have seen through the peephole warranted a door opening. I reached for his shirt to throw on in an emergency. He greeted someone at the door, and the person who responded didn’t sound familiar. There was some shuffling, something about needing a signature, and two good-byes.
“Delivery.” Soren’s voice was guarded which, naturally, put me on guard. “For you.” When he rounded into the room, he was holding a giant bouquet of flowers and a rectangular silver box.
My forehead pinched together. The bouquet was so large, it blocked his face and most of his upper half. “Are they from you?”
After he’d set them on the table, his gaze automatically drifted to the bouquet of daisies he’d picked up for me on the last visit. They were still going strong, the water looking freshly changed in the clear vase. Soren’s gaze moved between the two bouquets, reading too far into it if I was interpreting the look in his eyes correctly.
“No. They’re not,” he finally answered.
Rising from the bed, I padded toward the table and took the silver box from him when he held it out. “Who would send me flowers?”
“Pick a male name out of any phone book and you have an answer.” Soren’s arms crossed as he watched me open the box.
Inside was a stack of this upcoming month’s edition of French Vogue. There was a sticky note on the cover of the top one that had “Page 42” scribbled down.
Soren pulled the notecard from the bouquet, his expression darkening as he read it. Flipping it around, he recited it. “‘On to bigger and better things.’ Since it’s signed with a giant E, I can take a guess who these are from. I don’t know a lot of tools who think they’re such a hotshot, they can send a girl flowers and sign their name with one letter and call it good.”
Even I felt a little annoyed he’d done this, but I couldn’t let Soren know that. It would only make him more pissed. “He sent them as a congratulations. For my first official spread in an international magazine.” I lifted the copy on top for him to see.
Soren gave the bouquet one more suspicious look before taking the magazine and flipping through it. “Your first international spread?”
The dark notes had left his face, his eyes shining when they met mine. He was excited for me—proud of me. I was so wrapped up in that, I forgot which spread I’d shot. I really could have used those few seconds to prepare him for what he was about to see.
I knew the moment he found the right page. The look that broke across his face was the exact one I guessed any boyfriend would have when he saw his girlfriend pictured as I was in an international magazine.
“You’re . . .” He blinked at the photo, moving it around like it might change in a different light.
“I was shot nude,” I said in the best even, straight-forward tone I could. “The client wanted the focus on their accessories. They felt clothing would distract from that objective.”
“They wanted the focus on their accessories?” Soren rolled his neck, cracking it a couple of times. “And they thought putting them on a naked woman was the way to achieve that?”
I had to chew the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning because he kind of had a point. “Three things,” I said, giving a preemptive wince as he flipped to the next page. His eyes went dinner-plate round. “One, it’s tasteful nude. Nothing that you’re worried about showing is showing in any of those shots. Believe me, I checked.”
“Believe me, I’m checking too.”
Again, I had to chew the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing over the irony that he was getting upset over some tastefully posed nude shots of me in a magazine when I was standing two feet in front of him, just as naked with everything showing.
“Two, the accessories actually do stand out if you are able to step out of those subjective, concrete boots and try on a pair of objective loafers.”
He made a face that suggested he doubted that.
“And three, Europeans are different about nudity than we are. It’s natural and respected over there, instead of taboo and dirty the way we make it over here.”
“This is supposed to make me feel better about my girlfriend being naked on . . .”—he counted off the pages of the spread, one by one, a new crease forming in his forehead with each one—“ten pages?”
“Would it make you feel better if you knew that French Vogue’s target audience is ninety-five percent women, and that other five percent are men who—this one’s for you, baseball player—bat for the other team?”
He was still gaping at the pages like he’d just found out I was the centerfold in one of the trashiest porn magazines on the market. “Does it look like any of that makes me feel better?”
My feet padded toward him. “No.” Slipping my hands behind his back, I tried to press myself against him and distract him from the magazine. It wasn’t working. “Does this kind of stuff make you uncomfortable? Is this something I should have talked with you about or warned you about?”