Chapter 3
“Which one’s your favorite?”
She looked up from the shelf of silicone anal beads, warmth creeping up her neck from under the collar of her tee.
Des stood just far enough away to maintain propriety, hands in the pockets of his well-tailored slacks.
His head was cocked, and his gunmetal gray eyes sparkled with mischief that complemented the smirk on his lips.
“Excuse me?” She kept her voice at its most professional and ignored the answering smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth.
“It’s a perfectly legitimate question.” He removed a hand from his pocket and gestured around the store. “You work in sales. You must have a professional recommendation.”
The smile she’d been fending off pushed through, but she rolled her eyes and resumed stocking the display.
“If you gave our products more than a cursory glance, you’d notice the staff recommendation stickers on some of them.
” The lingerie rack caught her eye, the colors and styles half-haphazardly mixed up, and she shifted directions to reorganize it.
Des followed. “Au contraire, my dear Camille. I saw Tristan’s recommendation—a leather bondage set. Not surprising. And I saw Lenny’s recommendation—a veiny green thing that was bigger than my forearm.”
He held up said forearm for emphasis, deliciously long sepia-colored fingers curled into a fist at the end. Cami dragged her attention away to the sexy pirate costume that had started to slip from her lax fingers.
“What I didn’t see,” his voice deepened, “was your name on anything.”
She glanced at him, sidelong. There was intrigue in his eyes, in the way he dipped his chin minutely toward his chest, as though to get closer to her eye level. This close, the black line in his left eye was much more obvious.
“Has anybody ever told you you have beautiful eyes?” she asked.
He squinted at her with something akin to suspicion. “Usually I'm just told the coloboma freaks people out.”
She tilted her head, curiosity getting the better of her. “Is that the black line?”
He hummed a confirmation. “It’s a birth defect, but it doesn’t affect my sight.” He rattled it off nonchalantly, like he’d repeated the line verbatim countless times throughout his life.
A thoughtful hmm escaped her as she studied his eyes. “It’s pretty.”
He arched a brow at her, and the expression had amusement tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Cami,” he said, “you can’t distract me with flattery and feminine wiles.”
“Aw, you think I have feminine wiles?” She’d never been accused of having wiles before, and it was curiously exhilarating.
He didn’t answer though, just stared pointedly at her, his coloboma pulling her gaze like a focal line directly to his own.
She sighed. “My recommendation is on the candle display by the door.”
For a long moment, he was silent, and she felt the heat of an unwelcome flush begin to creep up her neck toward her cheeks.
“Candles?”
Her chin jerked upward. “They’re lavender-scented. They’re nice in the bath.”
Her body thrummed with embarrassment. It was silly to pick candles as her favorite product in a store that sold sex toys, and it stung that he found her pick on the pedestrian side. Childish, maybe. Unimaginative.
Maybe she was. Maybe that was the problem.
At the edge in her voice, he paused, his body curling in toward her as though to block out the world around them.
“Don’t get me wrong, Cami,” he said, his tone more intimate and his smile hesitant.
“You in the bath is the best mental image I’ve had all month, but scented candles never gave anybody an orgasm. ”
Having worked at Sex on the Beach for the past year, she was sure that wasn’t true, but she wasn’t going to say that out loud. She’d never get through the full sentence without spontaneously combusting.
“You shouldn’t say things like that to me,” she chastised, hanging up the sexy pirate costume. “People have been ejected from the store for less than that. Lenny doesn’t like people harassing her staff.”
“Am I harassing you?”
“Yes.” As she darted to the checkout counter, she cast a smile over her shoulder to find an answering smirk on his lips.
He approached the counter as she stepped behind it.
The woody, citrus scent of his aftershave filled her lungs and swayed her closer over the barrier between them.
With him across from her, his mouth was harder to ignore.
He was clean-shaven, not a hint of stubble offered to camouflage the promising curve of his full lower lip.
A smattering of freckles spilled across the bridge of his nose like brown sugar that escaped the spoon on a trip to a bowl of oatmeal.
She wondered if he would taste just as sweet.
He leaned against the glass, elbows braced on it. “Do you want me to stop?”
The thick blonde rope of her ponytail slipped over her shoulder as she cocked her head. “I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I may incriminate myself.”
His smirk transformed into an all-out grin, his gray eyes wide and sparkling like a kid on Christmas morning. She rolled her eyes. Was he so excited that she enjoyed his attention? Surely he had more established, attractive, experienced women than her fawning all over him.
“If you aren’t going to buy anything, you should go.” However much she liked having him around, she did have a job to do. “I told you, Lenny isn’t here.”
“Lenny’s never here,” he countered. Cami tried to point out that Lenny didn’t like salespeople, but he plowed on. “Maybe I just keep coming back to see you. Did you ever think of that?” He waggled his eyebrows.
The thought that he might enjoy her company to such a degree sent a thrill of excitement through her. She did her best to tamp it down. Nothing good had ever come from mixing business with pleasure.
This business isn’t strictly yours, though.
“If you aren’t going to buy anything…” She glanced toward the door, grateful for the excuse to look away from his mouth and the things it promised.
“All right, all right. Twist my arm.” He straightened and scanned the immediate area.
He scooped up a small clitoral vibrator, the kind with a strap that slid over a finger, and pushed it onto the polished glass counter.
“If I have to buy sex toys to keep your attention, then that’s a sacrifice I’ll just have to make. ”
She heaved a put-upon sigh and rang up the toy.
He held out a credit card, shiny and black, without waiting for the price, and she tapped the card against the point-of-sale machine.
She wondered what it must be like to be able to buy things just to keep someone talking, to have that kind of financial freedom.
She’d assumed he had money the moment she met him.
He dressed impeccably and carried himself with the air of a man who never worried how he was going to pay his grandmother’s heating bill.
She had never in her life picked up something random and purchased it without thought—especially not something as expensive as the stock in Sex on the Beach.
The vibe he’d picked was one of the cheapest in the store, and it was still more than she spent on food in a week.
If you’re putting it between your legs, Lenny had said when she hired Cami, do you really want it to be cheap?
“Would you like a bag?”
“No.” His tone deepened, and he replaced his elbow on the counter, this time using the motion to cross some of the distance between them.
The tantalizing scent of his cologne teased her nose.
His gaze flickered to the floor by the wall, where Cami’s purse lay nestled next to a discarded stool. “Why don’t you just toss it in there?”
“My purse?” She narrowed her eyes, sliding her focus from him to her bag and back again.
She cocked her head in question, but he didn’t elaborate.
Then, comprehension dawned. Fierce heat bloomed in her cheeks and she licked her lower lip.
Her mouth had gone dry and cottony. He smirked and she blurted, “Customers are not allowed to buy me sex toys.”
“Is that a rule?” His gaze tracked the trail of her tongue along her lip, then lingered there as though he could see the moisture dry.
“It is now,” she squeaked.
“Tell me the truth, Cami.” Her name rolled off his tongue like it belonged there, cupped by his lips.
Her skin tingled with awareness that made her cheeks heat, and all traces of her smile died as his eyes took her in.
His gaze met hers, flickered to note the blush on her cheeks, then traced lower, to linger on her mouth.
“Have you ever used one of the products that you sell?”
Her heart rapped against her ribcage, and she was sure he must be able to hear it. “Of course.” She tried to play it off as a silly question with an awkward shrug.
“Besides the candles,” he elaborated. “One like this.”
Her gaze dropped involuntarily to the vibrator on the counter as he pushed it toward her. Enticing images of that vibe on his finger flooded through her.
Her mind raced for an answer, something pithy and clever, a lie that made her seem as experienced as he was, but her brain seemed to have fled her body. The silence stretched on too long, until he took pity on her and attempted to dispel the tension that hung thickly in the air between them.
“And you call yourself a saleswoman.” He turned away to gesture widely at the store around him.
“You have the world at your fingertips, and you’ve never sampled its pleasures?
What do you say when people ask for recommendations?
What would you think if you asked a waiter what was good, and he said he’d never tasted his own menu? ”
Though her cheeks were still flaming, she held up a finger to halt his playful rant. “I’ll have you know I am extremely familiar with the online reviews of everything we sell.”
“Online reviews?” He laughed, the sound rushing through her like hot chocolate spreading through her belly. “You trust your sexual experiences to reviews? That’s just unacceptable. And unprofessional, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
In spite of her best efforts, the corners of her mouth twitched with the smile she suppressed. “I do mind, actually.”
“This is a travesty.” He blew past her comment as though she hadn’t said anything. “An outrage. One that must be rectified immediately.”
“Rectified,” she mouthed. “And how do you propose I rectify it?”
“With orgasms!” He spread his arms at his sides, as though to showcase how obvious the answer was.
She flinched, flapping her hands to shush him. The last thing she needed was someone overhearing and feeling the need to weigh in on her orgasms—or lack thereof.
“You’re surrounded by products designed to provide them. Test some out.”
She gave an airy snort of suppressed laughter. “My employee discount isn’t that generous. Good toys cost money. I can’t afford the kind worth having.”
Embarrassing to admit, yes, but true nonetheless. The little money she made went toward rent and food and lattes from her school’s cafeteria. Besides, orgasms had never been high on her priority list. She’d gone twenty-four years without having one, and she’d managed just fine so far.
“I can,” he insisted. “Let me buy some for you.”
It sounded so illicit. Allow a man to buy her sex toys?
A sales rep, at that? Not in a million years.
She didn’t have a problem with toys—if she did, she would have chosen another line of work—but toys were an intimate purchase.
They were bought when alone or with a partner.
They weren’t party favors handed out to anyone who happened through the front door.
“That would be inappropriate,” she protested, but her eyes flickered down to the vibe she was still holding in one hand. Her fingertip traced the sharp edge of the plastic packaging.
Sex toys were the one thing she hadn’t tried in her quest for orgasms. They were intimidating, and expensive, and getting off had always seemed like a terrible reason to break her budget.
Besides, if she tried a toy and it didn’t work…
well, it would just be one more piece of evidence proving there was something wrong with her.
“You want to.” Des leaned in, bracing his forearms against the edge of the counter as he bridged some of the distance between them. His voice pitched lower, intriguing and intimate. “Inappropriate or not, you want to say yes. I can see it in your eyes.”
Stupid, disloyal eyeballs.
“Des…” She sighed. She’d run out of excuses; at least ones she was willing to give him.
“Come on, Cami.” His smile was playfully reassuring. “You don’t even have to tell me how it went. We’re friends, right?”
That wasn’t the word she would have used, but he didn’t give her a chance to say so.
“Just let me treat you.”
“It’s a vibrator, Desmond,” she snarked, “not an ice cream cone.”
“Exactly.” His smile widened into a grin that made the corners of her lips twitch with the desire to answer it. Then he snagged the package from her hand and tossed it with impeccable aim toward her purse, where it landed with a soft thump. “What are friends for?”
“Hey—”
Des had already started to back toward the door, sliding one hand into his pocket. He used the other to give her a mock salute just as he shouldered the door open. The bell above it chimed his exit. “Have fun, Cami. Think of me.”