We ate in silence. Or, he ate, and I picked at my food, too sidetracked by the naked man next to me to truly enjoy anything but the scenery. His elbow grazed against my arm as he ate, sending goosebumps down my skin. I was dizzy from his clean and manly scent—evidently he’d skipped the organic bath products this time, which was a step in the right direction for him as well. Even the way he tackled his meal was distracting. He ate thoughtfully. A couple of bites of eggs, then a nibble of toast, a swallow of coffee. Repeat.
Hot Marc had always been hot. Now I was starting to realize he was fascinating in other ways too. Like, beyond the fact that he was well-educated and had a farming hobby. The deliberation he showed in everything was just… well, the exact opposite of me. I didn’t even particularly draw deliberately, which was why I’d been drawn to the sketchy style of comics to begin with. I was always nervous I’d do art wrong. And dating wrong. And everything wrong. Hello, neuroses!
“This is good,” he said after a while.
“Thank you.” It was almost embarrassing to acknowledge with a response—it was eggs and toast. A sprinkle of cheese. How easy could a meal get? On the other hand, it was probably the most complicated thing I’d made in a long time, so I’d take it. Cheese requires a deft grating for the proper distribution, so. “How’s the coffee?”
He glanced at me warily, as though he wasn’t sure if this was another set up to mock him. “It’s perfect. Thank you for making it to my specifications.”
“How do you know I did? I could have poured garlic in there and you wouldn’t have noticed with all that sugar.” Well, I hadn’t set out to mock him. It was just too easy.
“Let me guess—you take yours black.”
I grinned. “Actually, I prefer espresso.” Black with an extra cool factor, basically.
“I’ll remember that.”
I looked up from scuttling my eggs around my plate to see that he was staring at me. No, not staring—studying. As though I were something to learn. Zounds.
It made me feel warm and buzzy inside, and maybe that was weird because it wasn’t exactly flattering to be treated like a class subject. Except, it was flattering because I wasn’t a class subject. Marc didn’t have to know me to get a passing grade. He was learning about me because he wanted to. But it was just a sex thing, I reminded myself, he was just being deliberate again.
Admittedly, being on the receiving end of his deliberation made me hot and bothered. Remember those old ads about your brain on drugs being like an egg? Well, my brain on Marc was like that. I was an actual scrambled egg. Which made mine a tad less appetizing.
It was definitely time to move this discussion along. I set my mug and half-eaten breakfast on the nightstand and blinked up at him. “You’ve had coffee now.” Hint, hint.
He raised a challenging eyebrow. “Can I finish my eggs?”
He literally had two bites left, but I waited quietly, patiently, while he ate them. “Now?”
At a snail’s pace, he wiped his mouth with a paper towel, folded it, and set it on his empty plate. Then he put his plate on the nightstand. And then he turned back to me. Two seconds before I actually screamed. “Yes, now.”
“Okay. Cool.” I moved to sit with my legs underneath me, looking like I wasn’t about to scream ever, and faced him. “We should have a thorough discussion about the do’s and don’t’s of seduction, obviously. Maybe check out some movies, read some books—”
“I like books,” he interjected.
I had a feeling the books I meant were not the same kind of books he meant, but we could work that out later. “Right. And we can try a bunch of different things out together.”
“Sure.” He seemed to especially like that idea. His pupils darkened, moving down to my lips before returning to my eyes.
It made me nervous. In a good way. In a very good way. In a change-my-undies kind of way. And yet he was still talking. Talking is the anti-sexy. Damn his mixed messages!
“But one of the biggest components of seduction is the element of surprise. If we talk about everything beforehand, it’s not going to have the same effect.”
I ran my hand along the top of my nightshirt, fidgeting with the neckline while I waited for him to process how I didn’t care and how he shouldn’t either because sexies should be happening, but—no. “Oh. Huh,” I said.
Time to abandon the bedroom eyes. It wasn’t a terrible opening, though, for what I’d been thinking, it’s just that I had expected a different response. I had expected the seduction to begin immediately, so that I could play hard to get. The only recourse was for me to roll over and just play super cool while I presented my theory.
“So. I was thinking. We can talk about all of that, but then we could take turns trying out what we’ve learned. That way we have to earn the reward. Like—no sex until we’re actually seduced.”
It had been a great idea when I’d been struggling to fall asleep. Now that I’d said it aloud, the problem with this approach stared at me blaringly—what if neither of us ever mastered seduction? Could I be doomed to never know the feel of Marc Kirby between my legs? Ye gods.
“That’s a good idea. Very scientific.” He paused. Was he thinking the same sad thoughts as me? “But what if we lie?”
He couldn’t mean what I thought he meant. “Lie as part of the seduction?”
“Lie and say we’ve been seduced when we’re really not.”
Now that was a good idea. How could I let him know I was seduced right now? That just the gentle brush of his eyes on my body could cause me to immediately become naked? Maybe that was too up front. Still, though, surely there was a way I could suggest that his words could make me easily seduced.
Or that I would pretend so no matter what dumb thing he said.
Not that I was going to let on anything to him about his brilliance. “Who would lie about that?” I asked, innocently.
He shot me an incredulous look. “Really?”
“Fine. I’d lie.” I wanted to be in the man’s pants—er, towel—so bad that all he had to do was show up, and I’d be ready to take off my clothes.
“Me too,” he admitted.
“Really?”
“Really.”
My stomach did a flip-flop and I ducked my head to hide my smile. “But we could probably tell, couldn’t we? With you, anyway. On your side. Because if you weren’t seduced, you wouldn’t be, you know…in ready position. Locked and loaded. Up and at ‘em.”
I wasn’t about to bring up a similar comparison about myself. I’d been wet since he’d walked out of the shower.
He could check, if he wanted. I wouldn’t stop him.
“But what if I were hard for another reason? Because we’d been watching something sexy for example. Or because it was morning.”
“Or because we’d been anticipating it for so long.”
“Exactly.”
“Hmm. It would probably make sense to just go ahead and get it over with now. Forget about any seduction this one time. You know? To keep us honest.”
“That’s a good point. Again, very scientific. Get it out of our systems. It takes the anticipation factor out of the equation.”
“Yes. ‘Cause there’s definitely anticipation.”
“Definitely.”
“Do you need me to…? Should I do something specific to get you interested?”
His lips curved into one of those signature amazing smiles of his. “There’s a beautiful half naked woman lying on my bed. As long as she doesn’t make me feel like a pedophile, that’s all I need to be interested.”