Chapter 18
NORA
I lean into him, suddenly needing to have my body against his as fully as possible.
His tongue is demanding, and I moan as I open for him to taste me completely, hungrily. He walks me back as he kisses me, and just as my knees feel like they’re melting, he lifts me up onto Sutton’s desk.
I part my knees and he steps close. He’s too tall to press the part of him against the part of me that I really want to be against, but I still rub against him like a cat against a pillar of catnip.
He runs his hands up my arms, resting one heavy palm on either side of my neck, making me feel held captive and at his mercy.
And I love every second of it.
Heat swirls through my body, pooling heavy and thick in my lower stomach, making my pussy ache.
I so want to press against him. No, grind against him.
I wiggle, shrugging out of the light flannel I’m wearing, leaving me in only a black tank top.
“Alex,” I breathe as I squirm on the desk, moving back, thinking I’ll pull him down on top of me, where I can get his full weight against me. “I—”
Suddenly, there’s a loud clatter, and I jump, pulling away.
We both look at where Sutton’s pen holder hit the floor and pens scattered across the floor. She has a round woven rug under her desk, but the plastic cylinder hit, bounced, and clattered against the linoleum, throwing pens everywhere.
“Oops,” Alex says.
I look up at him.
God, he’s cute.
And I really want to kiss him some more.
I just can’t do it here.
I push him back and scoot off the desk, kneeling to gather the pens. As I stand with the intact pen holder and set it on her desk again I say, “Sorry. I can’t make a mess on Sutton’s desk.”
He groans and steps close, cupping my face again. “Fuck, I want to make a mess of you.”
My eyes widen as sparks snap along my nerve endings. “That sounds really dirty.”
“Good. That’s exactly how I meant it.”
I grip the front of his shirt and pull him down, kissing him this time.
He lifts his head several delicious moments later, but not nearly long enough. I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of this man’s mouth.
“Do you trust me?” he asks.
I nod. “Yes.”
“Will you trust me to do something for you without expecting anything in return?” he asks.
“I don’t—”
“Wildflower,” he says, his voice husky and chiding.
“You do things for people all day long every single day. You trust that they care about you, but you still feel this need to do things for them. I’m asking you to trust that I want to do something for you, and I don’t want anything in return.
In fact, if you try to do anything for me, I’ll be upset and think it means that you don’t trust me. ”
“Wha…?” I stop and wet my lips. “What do you want to do?”
“If you trust me, you’ll let me just show you.”
So that’s the real question. Do I trust him enough for this? To do something without telling me what it is beforehand? And then to not feel obligated to repay him or somehow even things up?
“Wildflower,” he says, his voice coaxing, tempting. “Let me do this.”
I say the only thing I can. “Okay.”
Alex makes a little groaning noise that almost sounds like relief. Then he kisses me again. “Where’s your desk?” Alex asks against my mouth.
“In there,” I say, breathless. I motion toward my office.
He sweeps me up and starts for my doorway.
Wow, I love when he picks me up. The muscles, the hard chest, the warm body, the you’re mine feeling. We could do just this, and I’d be really happy.
Except, I think I have an idea of what’s going to happen, and that’s going to make me really happy too.
I know it’s not going to help my infatuation. But I don’t tell him no.
He pauses just across the threshold. “I’m gonna need some light.”
I reach over and flip the switch. I had Mark, the maintenance guy for City Hall, set it up so the wall switch would turn on the lamp on my desk instead of the overhead lights. I much prefer soft yellow light to fluorescent light.
But as the room lights up, Alex doesn’t move. He just stares.
My desk is enormous, taking up about half of my office. To be fair, the office isn’t huge. But it’s also full of boxes. There’s a walkway between the boxes and my desk and the doorway—Colton, the fire chief, insists on that, of course—but there’s not a lot of extra space.
But I need those boxes in here. They are full of T-shirts, plastic tumblers, totes, caps, glossy Welcome to Rebel pamphlets, pens, and, in a couple, frisbees.
I never know when I might need one of those things.
“You don’t have storage here at City Hall?” he finally asks.
“Of course we do,” I say. “We just don’t have enough storage.”
“Ah.”
“And…I need this stuff closer.”
“Uh huh.”
I know it looks like a mess. There are notebooks, books, folders, and catalogs stacked everywhere on my desk. And the lamp is…big. And…ornate.
It’s a smaller version of the Julia the otter statue from Main Street.
The lamp shade is a colorful patchwork of purple, yellow, and green, and Julia is about a foot and a half tall, wearing Mardi Gras beads and a mask, and holding a plate of beignets.
It also plays "Mardi Gras Mambo" by The Hawketts when I press a button on the back.
George Barbin, who fixes lamps, clocks, and small appliances, made it for me just because and I fucking love it.
There are also sticky notes everywhere, a million pens, three or four coffee mugs, and several binders.
In other words, there’s no room for me to sit on my desk.
I can’t even sit at my desk unless I remove those two binders from my chair.
I definitely can’t lie on my desk. Which is what I’m hoping Alex was thinking.
“You’re going to tell me that this only looks chaotic, but everything is actually exactly where it should be, right?” he asks.
I laugh. “Right.”
He looks down at me. “Well, I suppose it’s a good thing I’m pretty talented at thinking on my feet and pivoting.”
He swings me to the ground at the front of my desk, then turns me so I’m facing it.
“Hands on the desk. Somewhere,” he says.
I smile as I push a few things to the side and flatten my palms on the surface of my desk.
Alex moves in behind me, somehow fitting between me and the box of, I think, plastic water bottles.
He puts his hot mouth against the side of my neck. “There’s a lot going on in this office, but I want you to think of me when you walk in here tomorrow.”
I have no doubt I’ll think about him far more often than just tomorrow.
I already do.
“Just tomorrow?” I tease.
“You want more than that, Wildflower? I can make quite the impression.”
I swallow before answering a simple, “Yes.”
He makes a low groaning sound and sucks lightly on my neck. “Have I mentioned that I really fucking like you?”
I smile even as I think my whole body is melting. “Yeah, you have. But I like hearing it.”
He presses close, his body fully against mine, his hands on my hips. “This is not how I envisioned it, but I should be getting used to things not being what I expect them to be with you,” he says roughly against my ear.
I take a shaky breath. “What did you envision?”
“You really want to know?”
I nod my head.
“Are you sure?” His big hand glides back and forth over my stomach, fingers splayed wide.
“Yes,” I say.
“What if it’s really dirty?”
I know he can hear the breathiness in my tone when I say, “Then I especially want to hear it.”
He reaches up and grasps my chin, turning my head so that he can kiss me. It’s still deep and sweet, but now there is a hunger and intensity that wasn’t there before.
When he pulls away, he practically growls, “I wanted to lift you up on your desk, strip you down, spread you out, and make you come on my tongue.”
Okay, then. He really is going to tell me exactly what he was thinking, dirty and all.
I feel my pussy clench. “That might be the one thing that could be effective in getting me to clean my desk and be more organized,” I tell him.
There’s a brief pause, and I think I surprised him. Then he chuckles, the sound rumbling against my back where his chest is pressed. “Orgasms as an office organizational technique. I am willing to discuss this method.”
“I’m also tempted to just throw it all on the floor,” I admit.
He growls, and it’s not a lusty sound this time. “That actually makes my head hurt,” he says. “The idea of all of this on the floor, and then you just continuing with your work, picking things out of the piles off the floor rather than sorting it and putting it back in any kind of order.”
His hands are resting on my hips now, and we’re both fully clothed, but our bodies are pressed against one another, and we’re talking about oral sex, so this still feels intimate. Which makes the fact that I’m laughing seem odd. But I like it.
“I would do that,” I admit.
“Oh, I know. Which is the only reason that I’m going to keep you standing right here.” He squeezes my hips. “But I’m going to make this good too.”
Without thinking, I press my ass back against him. I can feel his erection against my lower back. “I guess this would work.”
He presses into me, his hand gliding around to my lower stomach again. “Oh yes, Wildflower, it would. But that’s not what we’re doing tonight.”
A stab of disappointment jabs my chest. “No?”
“You told me we weren’t going to sleep together.”
I did say that. Dammit.
“I’ve had some revelations between then and now,” I tell him.
His hand presses into my stomach, bringing me back against him more firmly. Then his hand glides lower so he’s cupping me through my jeans.
“Have you now?” he asks. “Such as?”
“Um.” I have to think about what he asked me. “Well, that I really want to anyway,” I say. “For one thing.”
He softly grinds the heel of his hand against my clit, and I gasp. Fuck that feels good. I grasp his wrist, not to stop him, but to keep him right there.
“And also,” I continue, before I lose my words. “We’ve been really upfront. I know you’re leaving in April. I’ll just keep that in mind and not start planning a wedding.”
His hand pauses, the grinding stopping.