Chapter 7
THE LOVE OF A REAL MAN
Two Years Later
“I was beginning to think you would never say yes to joining me for dinner.”
Six months of him asking—in the hallway, after meetings, once in the parking garage with his car keys in his hand and that grin on his face. Six months of me saying not yet while my stomach did backflips every time he leaned against my office doorframe.
James sets his wine glass down and the candlelight catches his jaw, the line of his throat above the open collar, and I realize I’m staring. I’ve been staring since we sat down. Some part of my brain keeps trying to play it cool and the rest of me has left the building.
“You asked me twelve times,” I say. “I figured it was time to say yes.”
“Twelve?” He tilts his head. “I had it at eleven.”
“You’re forgetting the shrimp cocktail. Holiday party.”
“That counts?”
“You leaned against the bar and said Brittany, have dinner with me while I had a jumbo shrimp hanging out of my mouth. It counts.”
He grins. The slow one. The one that starts on one side and takes its time getting to the other, and every time he does it my stomach flips like I’m sixteen and not a thirty-four-year-old single mother of three sitting in a restaurant in Little Italy trying to remember how a first date works.
Because that’s what this is. A first date.
My first first date in over a decade, and I spent forty-five minutes standing in my closet in my underwear with clothes piled on the bed before Cecily answered the FaceTime and said the green one, it does incredible things to your tits, stop overthinking and GO.
The green one. Wrap dress, deep V. I haven’t worn anything with a neckline like this in years and I keep catching James’s eyes dipping and coming back up, and each time he does it a flush runs up the back of my neck.
“You’re nervous,” he says.
“I’m not nervous.”
“Your napkin.”
I look down. I’ve folded my napkin into a tiny, tight square without realizing it. I flatten it back out and take a sip of wine. “Fine. I’m a little nervous.”
“Good.” He picks up his glass. “I’ve been nervous since you said yes.”
“That was four days ago.”
“I know. I’ve had four days of nervous.”
I laugh—loud, sudden, the kind that turns heads at the next table—and clap my hand over my mouth. He’s watching me over his wine glass with that expression, the warm one, the one that makes the back of my knees tingle, and I want to climb across this table.
I don’t climb across the table. I eat my scallops. They’re perfect—seared golden, sweet, a bright pop of citrus on the tongue—and I close my eyes on the first bite because I can’t help it. When I open them, he’s frozen with his fork halfway to his mouth.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing.” He blinks. Goes back to his branzino. “That was just—nothing.”
“You’re blushing.”
“I’m not blushing. It’s warm in here.”
“It’s October.”
“It’s a warm October.” He takes a very deliberate bite of fish and doesn’t look at me, and the tips of his ears are pink, and I feel a surge of something so bright and giddy it scares me. Delight. That’s what this is. Pure, reckless, fizzing delight—the kind I forgot my body could produce.
The waiter clears our plates. James orders dessert without asking me—“We’ll take the panna cotta, two spoons”—and when it arrives he pushes it to the center of the table and hands me a spoon and our fingers brush on the exchange.
A tiny collision. His index finger against my knuckle. Neither of us pulls back.
I take a bite of panna cotta and it’s silk, vanilla, a dark ribbon of caramel that coats my tongue. He takes a bite and watches me take another, and the eye contact over shared dessert is doing things to me that should not be legal in a public restaurant.
“James.”
“Yeah.”
“Ask if I want to go home with you tonight.”
He sets his spoon down. His eyes lock on mine and the restaurant shrinks—the clinking glasses, the couple at the next table, the waiter crossing the room—all of it falling away until it’s just his face in the candlelight and the low hum of my own pulse in my ears.
“Brittany.” His voice drops into the register that makes my thighs press together under the table. “Do you want to come home with me tonight?”
“Yes.” The word is out before he finishes the sentence. “God, yes.”
His hand tightens around the stem of his glass. His throat moves on a swallow. He doesn’t look away from me.
“Check, please,” he says.
I grab his shirt before the front door finishes closing. Both fists, twisting into the fabric, pulling him down to me. His mouth lands on mine and the sound I make against his lips is embarrassing—needy, desperate, a whimper I couldn’t stop if I tried. I don’t try.
His hands find my waist. He lifts me—actually lifts me, both hands gripping my hips, and I’m not a small woman and he picks me up like it’s nothing—and I wrap my legs around him and the friction of his body between my thighs makes me grind against him before my brain catches up.
He groans into my mouth. Deep, guttural, vibrating against my teeth, and the sound of it shoots straight down my spine and detonates between my legs.
“Couch,” I gasp.
He carries me. Three steps, four, his hands full of my ass, squeezing, and when his shin hits the couch he drops onto it and I’m in his lap, straddling him, my dress riding up around my thighs.
His face is level with my chest and I watch his eyes drop to the V of the wrap dress—the green one, the one that does things to my tits—and his expression goes slack.
“Jesus Christ, Brittany.” His voice comes out ruined. “Do you have any idea—” His hands slide up my thighs, pushing the dress higher. “Do you have any idea what you look like right now?”
I yank his shirt up. He lifts his arms and I drag it over his head and toss it and put my hands flat on his chest and my palms are actually tingling.
Broad, solid, dark hair, warm skin over hard muscle.
I run my hands down his stomach and feel it clench under my fingers and the power rush of it—I’m doing that, I’m making his body react—is intoxicating.
He pulls the tie of my wrap dress. One tug and it opens and he pushes it off my shoulders and I’m in a black bra and nothing else from the waist up, and he leans back against the couch and looks at me.
Not a scan. Not an inventory. He looks at me the way you look at something that stops you in your tracks.
“Fuck.” He breathes it. His hands come up and trace the curve of my waist, over my hips, fingers pressing into the soft skin of my stomach. “You are so goddamn hot. You don’t even realize.”
His mouth closes over my nipple through the bra and I arch into him and my hips roll forward and I feel him—hard, straining against his pants, pressing exactly where I need pressure—and a moan tears out of me that I couldn’t swallow if I wanted to.
I grind against him again, and again, chasing the friction, my clit throbbing against the ridge of him through layers of fabric, and it’s not enough. It’s not enough.
“Off.” I’m pulling at his belt. “Take these off, I need—”
“Tell me what you need.” His teeth drag across my collarbone. His hands are unclasping my bra and it falls away and his palms cover my breasts and his thumbs circle my nipples and I can’t think.
“You.” The word comes out raw. “I need you. It’s been so long—”
He pulls back. Looks at me. His hands cup my face and his thumbs trace my cheekbones and his eyes are so dark they’re almost black.
“That,” he says, low and precise, “is a crime. Let me make it worth it for you.”
His hand slides between my thighs. Pushes my underwear aside.
Two fingers stroke against me and find me soaked—dripping, aching, so swollen it’s almost tender—and the noise I make is not a moan.
It’s a sob. His fingers slide through the wet, parting me, finding my clit, and the first direct contact makes my hips buck so hard I almost come off his lap.
“Easy.” His mouth is at my ear. “I’ve got you.”
“Don’t go easy.” I fist his hair and pull his head back and kiss him with my teeth. “I don’t want easy.”
Something shifts in his face. The tenderness is still there but behind it something hotter, hungrier, and his fingers push inside me and curl and his thumb presses my clit and my whole body clenches around him.
I rock against his hand—riding his fingers, grinding into his palm—and he watches my face with that dark, focused intensity, adjusting his pressure, his angle, reading every gasp like it’s data.
“You’re close,” he says.
“Don’t stop—don’t you dare—”
He doesn’t stop. His fingers drive deeper, faster, his thumb circling my clit in tight, relentless strokes, and the orgasm doesn’t build—it ambushes.
It hits me like a wall, a full-body seizure of pleasure so sharp it’s almost pain, the line between the two obliterated.
My thighs clamp around his hand and my back arches and a scream rips out of my throat—an actual scream, jagged and loud and animal—and the contractions pulse through me in waves so intense my vision whites out.
I can’t see. I can’t breathe. I can feel my heartbeat everywhere—my throat, my wrists, between my legs where his fingers are still inside me, still moving, drawing it out until I’m shaking so hard my teeth chatter.
“Oh my God.” I collapse forward against his chest. My face is in his neck and I’m panting and trembling and my entire body feels like it’s been turned inside out. “Oh my God.”
His hand slides out of me and goes to his belt.
I hear the clink of the buckle, the rasp of the zipper, and I push myself up to help—shoving his pants down, pulling him free, wrapping my hand around his cock.
He sucks air through his teeth and his head drops back against the couch and his hips jerk up into my fist.
“Condom,” I breathe. “Please tell me you have—”
“Wallet. Back pocket.”
I reach behind him, dig the wallet out of his crumpled pants, find the condom. My hands are shaking so badly I can barely tear the packet and he takes it from me, rolls it on, and I rise up on my knees and position him beneath me and sink down.
The stretch is blinding. He fills me completely—thick, deep, the kind of full that pushes all the air out of my lungs—and I hear myself moan his name in a voice I don’t recognize. Low. Wrecked. Greedy.
I start to move. Slow at first—lifting my hips, sliding up the length of him, dropping back down—and his hands grip my thighs, fingers sinking into the soft flesh, pulling me down harder.
He’s staring at my body—my breasts swaying, my hips rolling, the curve of my stomach—and the look on his face isn’t tolerance.
It isn’t generosity. It’s hunger. Raw, undisguised, starving.
“Look at you.” His voice is a growl. His hands move up to my waist and grip tight and he drives up into me as I come down and the collision makes us both groan. “Ride me. Just like that.”
I ride him. I ride him with everything I have—my thighs burning, my hips grinding, sweat sliding down my chest—and his hands are everywhere.
My breasts, my ass, my hips, squeezing, gripping, pulling me into him like he can’t get enough contact.
His mouth finds my nipple and sucks hard and the sensation rockets from my breast to my clit and my rhythm falters, goes ragged, greedy.
“Harder,” I pant. “Fuck me harder.”
His hips snap up. The angle changes and he hits something deep inside me that turns my vision to static and I’m loud now—loud and past caring, moaning every time he thrusts, my nails digging into his shoulders hard enough to mark him.
His hands clamp on my hips and he takes over the rhythm, driving up into me with a force that shoves the couch back an inch against the floor with every stroke.
The second orgasm starts as a pressure—a dense, heavy knot low in my belly, tightening with every thrust. Then his thumb finds my clit again, circling fast and hard while he fucks up into me, and the knot detonates.
This one isn’t a wave. It’s a demolition.
My entire body seizes—spine locked, mouth open, no sound because my lungs have stopped working—and then the scream comes, torn from somewhere below my ribs, and the pleasure is so violent it crosses into pain, a searing white-hot pulse that contracts through me over and over, each one sharper than the last. I’m shaking.
I’m crying. I’m coming so hard my thighs are spasming and my hands can’t hold on and he wraps his arms around me and drives up one last time, deep, buried to the hilt, and I feel him let go—his whole body going rigid beneath me, his groan breaking against my neck.
We stay like that. Tangled on his couch, sweating, panting, my forehead pressed to his temple, his arms locked around my waist. My heartbeat is a jackhammer. His is the same—I can feel it slamming against my chest through our pressed-together skin.
He turns his head. His lips brush my ear.
“That,” he murmurs, “was only the beginning. I’m not done with you yet.”
I pull back enough to see his face. His eyes are dark, satisfied, already rekindling. My body is boneless and trembling and I can still feel the aftershocks pulsing between my legs.
I smile.
“Good. Because I want more.”
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