She parted her lips to speak, her natural instinct, her professional desire to speak the truth plainly kicking in. “You’re sweeter, kinder, and more affectionate than I would have thought, given why you were in my office,” she said, looking him square in the eyes.
He stopped in his tracks, forcing her to stop too. “You didn’t think I could be affectionate?”
“Well,” she said as if the answer were obvious.
“I so can,” he said, and wrapped his arms around her waist, and tugged her close, dropping his forehead to hers. They stood in the middle of the crowded sidewalk. Men and women in suits and clickety-clack heels with determined looks on their faces, rushing to catch trains and buses and cabs home, were forced to walk around them. “With the right woman . . .” he said and brushed his lips ever so gently against hers so that all thoughts tumbled out of her skull, leaving her with nothing but feelings. The fresh bloom of feelings for this man.
“Who’s the right woman?” she asked when he pulled away.
“You,” he whispered, in a voice that was clear and direct.
And cut straight through the walls. He couldn’t possibly be suggesting there was more to them? Could he? They were nighttime. They were deadlines. They were the city after hours. They weren’t more. They weren’t a couple. Whatever affection he felt for her was clearly borne of sex. So she turned the conversation in that much less frightening direction as they resumed their walk uptown.
“By the way, Jack, I’ve noticed that filthy mouth of yours was much more refined the first night I met you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
She nodded. “Yes. Now the way you talk to me is blunter. Rougher,” she said, and she’d seen the slight changes the more they were together. He seemed to let go more with that dirty mouth, using words he hadn’t used the night they’d met, asking rougher questions, demanding answers.
“Maybe it’s part of my plan to woo you,” he joked. “Is it working?”
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
He leaned closer, brushed her hair away from her shoulder, and whispered hotly in her ear, “I think you’re a very dirty girl beneath that good-girl exterior.”
His words sent a rush through her. He was right. He was so right.
She tilted her face to him, and answered with a curve of her lips. “And you like it that way.”
“I love it that way,” he said in a husky voice that gave away his desire.
She tensed, wondering if he’d been like this with Aubrey. If he’d thrown her down on his desk, if he’d demanded answers about her dirty fantasies. She wished terribly that the thought had not touched down in her head, but now that it was there, it worried away at her. There was no way she’d ask him if he’d been like that with other women. That was too personal. Besides, it was a rude question. Michelle Milo aspired not to be rude.
Instead, she simply sighed.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked, as they turned the corner onto a quieter street lined with trees and a mix of pretty brownstones, some white, some brick, all beautiful.
“Nothing,” she said, putting her game face back on.
“I don’t believe that. And you’re too damn smart to think you can get away with that kind of answer.”
“What kind of answer?”
“The kind that’s a lie. There is something wrong, and I bet I know what it is.”
“Okay. Try me,” she said and they were treading in dangerous territory, but then this was her stock-in-trade. Surely, she could handle it with him.
“You wanted to know if I’m like this with other women I’ve been with, don’t you?”
She gasped in surprise, and they stopped walking. She backed up to stand near the brown stoop of a building with planters in the first floor windows.
“I’m like this with you,” he added, his eyes locked on hers as he held her hand tighter.
“You are?” she asked carefully.
He nodded. “Of course I like the way we fuck. I love the way we have sex. Does that mean every other woman wanted it this way?” he asked, and a part of her hoped and prayed he wouldn’t answer. He didn’t. Thankfully. “It means we fit.”
Her heart jumped at those words, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. She wanted to swat it back into place. Hell, they were talking about sex, not matters of the heart, so why on earth should that annoying organ be doing a pitter-patter? But as he gazed at her, his blue eyes never wavering, she saw a flash of something more in his expression. He wasn’t just talking about how they fit in the bedroom.
“I think so too,” she said quietly, as they delved into territory she usually only started to explore in a therapy session with a patient, but here they were on the streets of New York having a frank conversation about how they liked to fuck. And yet it was a conversation about more than sex too.
“It means you’re perfect for me. And I can be myself with you,” he said, grasping her hand tighter, as he moved in closer. Heat radiated off of him.
Oh God, her heart thumped hard now. And she couldn’t take it. She couldn’t take all this beating in her chest, this heat, this stretching and expanding inside. “So you can be the dirty guy who likes a good girl on the outside but with a filthy mind?” she countered, arching an eyebrow, and somehow successfully deflecting the deeper meaning of this conversation, even though she wanted to clasp it and hold it close.