Chapter 13
I wake to a bright room, blinking at the sun trickling through the curtains.
I haven’t slept past sunrise in as long as I can remember.
I consider that I should have set my alarm, despite the fact that my body naturally wakes me early.
But rational thought was nowhere near my addled mind before I fell asleep last night.
Your senses being completely annihilated by the hottest sex of your life can have that effect.
Last night was the hottest sex of my life. I need to let that sink in for a minute: the fact that I had the hottest sex of my fucking life with a man I work with. A man I’ll have to be professional with on an ongoing basis.
Which is something I can totally do. I am well versed in noncommittal sex. It’s in the bag.
Never mind that afterward, he laid me down, whispering sweet nothings and scattering gentle kisses on my sensitive skin.
Pulled the covers over me when goosebumps rose on my arms and thighs, smoothing the material delicately with his strong hands.
Went to the bathroom to dispose of the condom and came back with a glass of water for me.
Never mind the tender, thoughtful Ryan that rose to the surface like a buoy on stormy waters.
He’s not the first man to treat me that way after fucking my brains out. Just because I can’t remember anyone else off the top of my head doesn’t mean they haven’t existed. I did just get my brains fucked out, after all.
I move to get up and feel warm fingers close around my hand. Ryan’s.
I’m so used to waking up alone that I completely forgot we didn’t get around to saying goodbye last night.
Instead, we lay in bed for a while, talking, and kissing, and touching, and then Ryan rolled me onto my back and pressed his ready member against me again, and well.
I wasn’t exactly going to ask him to leave.
I peek at his profile. The prominent line of his nose, the pout of his lips. The shadow along his jaw, the fan of his lashes. So peaceful. Relaxed in a way I’ve never seen him.
He’s still sleeping. Does he even realize that he’s grasping my hand? Or is it something he’s doing unconsciously?
It feels…nice.
Too nice.
I start to rise again, but I’m stopped when I hear him rumble, “Stay.”
So he is awake.
“We should get up,” I say.
“I have a better idea,” he says. His voice is deeper from sleep, radiating from him like a cat’s purr. “We stay here.”
That does not sound unappealing. “What time do we need to get to the studio for filming?” I have an interview with San Fran Live this morning.
“Not till ten.” He looks at the bedside clock. “We have plenty of time. My alarm’ll go off when we need to get up.” He pulls me closer by the waist, and I don’t resist.
“You set your alarm last night?” I ask.
“I set it in the morning.”
“Yesterday?”
“Yeah,” he says, like it’s obvious.
“You set your alarm for the next morning, the previous morning?”
“Yeah,” he says again. “Right after it goes off, I set it for the next day.”
I am bewildered. “Why?”
“Because it’s efficient. A task completed. And no chance I’ll forget.”
There is something so Ryan about this maniacally responsible practice that it makes my legs feel heavy, rooted to the mattress. “That is serial killer behavior.”
“If we’d left it up to you, we might have slept in.”
“Nah, Maral will be knocking on my door within an hour. She comes to my room every morning.”
“You know your phone has an alarm on it,” he says.
“It’s not a live wake-up call, I’m always up. It’s just a routine, how we start our days while traveling. And often at home. After my workout, she comes over and we talk while I shower and dress.”
“Damn,” he says. “Is that an open position? How do I apply?”
My pulse gallops as he pulls me in for a kiss.
Morning breath be damned, the soft heat of his mouth right now rivals coffee for the best thing to wake up to.
Just like every other kiss we’ve shared, it intensifies at warp speed, as though the world is ending and we’ll never get another chance at human contact again.
The answering tug between my legs is acute.
He responds automatically, as though his brain is connected to my body by a circuit, sensing what I need and zeroing in on fulfilling it.
He kisses down my chest, my belly, and disappears beneath the sheets.
I sweep the white material away so I can watch him in action, working such masterful magic on me that it takes only a handful of seconds for me to plummet to my little death.
“Christ, you’re a dream,” he says, kissing the insides of my still-trembling thighs. “So responsive. I want to go down on you all day, make you come until you can’t see straight.”
As if to underscore his words, he gives my clit a dreamy French kiss. I’m still so sensitive from my climax that I gasp at even the gentlest contact.
“Maybe you’re just really good at giving head,” I breathe. “How are you still single, exactly?”
His gaze remains locked on mine for a long moment. “Maybe I’ve been waiting for you.”
I lick my suddenly dry lips. My heart refuses to slow down, even though my orgasm has passed. That’s the kind of sentiment that sends this barreling away from the discreet, one-time, no-strings thing it has to be, and neither of us can have that.
In an effort to shift the atmosphere, I pull him up for an open-mouthed kiss, tasting myself on his tongue. I snake a hand down and grasp his cock, giving it a long stroke, and he shudders against me.
“I’m pretty competitive,” I say, pushing him onto his back and inching down his body. “Can’t let you show me up.”
“Ana,” he says, voice hoarse as he twigs my intention, “it’s not a compet—”
I give his head a gentle lick, and his breath leaves him in a short burst, his hands fisting in the tousled sheets. When I close my lips around the smooth dome, his hips move in a slow roll that rivals a Magic Mike dancer, and it’s such a turn-on that I feel my own want building yet again.
After the number of orgasms he’s given me in the last nine hours, I’m amazed at how quickly I rev. He’s a drug, addicting me, stringing me out.
The thought should cause warning bells to go off, but at the moment my brain seems only willing to process sensations, which are numerous and varied and overwhelming.
The taste of him, the feeling of power and pride as he takes his pleasure from my mouth, his voice rasping a litany of filth and praise as his eyes consume me with such rapture I have to look away.
His body tightens and he warns me that he’s close, tells me to stop, presumably so he doesn’t finish in my mouth, but I only milk him harder.
The muscles of his abdomen clench as he growls glorious nonsense about my eyes, my mouth, my legs, and my ass, his climax ripping through him so fiercely that I know this image will replay in my mind all day—or much longer, if I’m honest.
He’s still rippling with tremors when he drags me to him for a kiss so deep, so searching, that I forget myself, twining my arms around his neck and giving myself over to the uproar behind my sternum.
A sensation both delightful and torturous, suggesting that, despite my best intentions, this may not be as easy to give up as I thought.
Decked out in citrus colors, San Fran Live’s brightly lit studio teems with crew members rushing this way and that.
A producer named Brit greets us as we arrive and leads us to a green room offering various craft service options.
Shanthi beelines for the pastries as Brit takes me through the run of show, explaining when I’ll be called out to the sound stage for my segment.
She praises me for knowing the basics of on-camera interviews, calling me an “old hand”—a term I might have preferred she edit—and offers to answer any questions I may have. Being an old hand, I don’t.
There’s a screen mounted to the wall on which we can watch the show before my segment is scheduled to film.
I try to focus on the content of the interviews with a famous tennis player, a dog trainer to the stars, and a nutritionist launching her own line of premade smoothies-in-a-jar, knowing that viewers get a slight dopamine hit when guests mention something from an earlier segment in their interview.
And I want to make as strong an impression as possible.
I’ve done lots of TV spots before, but given our meeting with Craig Waters is in just a couple of days, this might be a clip that his people would weigh more heavily in their considerations of whether or not I’m fit to host my own show.
But focusing is not exactly my forte this morning.
You’d think I’d be loose as a goose after last night.
And this morning. My muscles are thrumming with the memory of Ryan’s body, though, the prowess with which he wields it, and my mind is wrestling with the fact that I ever could have considered him straitlaced.
Having him in such close proximity and tamping down the post-carnal vibe between us in the presence of Maral and Shanthi is only winding me tighter.
Ryan had returned to his room by the time Mar showed up at my door a couple of hours ago.
It was a mercy. I was going to tell her about what happened between us, of course, but I’d preferred to avoid bashful greetings and awkward goodbyes if she happened upon us.
There had been nothing awkward about the way Ryan said goodbye, as if he wasn’t going to see me an hour later when the San Fran Live car came to pick us up.
Nothing awkward about the deep, slow, winding kiss that shot sparks down my spine, causing me to arch against him and draw a rumbling groan from his chest.
We couldn’t have done that in front of Maral.