Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 92136 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 461(@200wpm)___ 369(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92136 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 461(@200wpm)___ 369(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Eye contact with me seemed to do the trick. “Definitely.” He held the door open for me, and we walked out into the hall.
We waited silently for the elevator, and when it arrived he guided me into it with one hand on my lower back. It was empty, and as soon as the doors were shut behind us, he spun me to face him and grabbed me tight around the waist with one arm. “You. Are. Gorgeous.”
The elevator began to descend, making me feel weightless. My heart beat faster. “Thank you.”
He buried his face in my neck. Inhaling deeply, he squeezed me tighter. “Thank you. For suggesting this. For arranging it.”
“Of course. You deserve a night out.”
He opened his mouth and kissed his way down the side of my throat, making my arms and legs tingle. “Easy, easy,” I admonished when I felt his hand brushing up my thigh. “We’ve got hours, don’t we?”
“Yes. And I intend to make every second count.” But he released me as the elevator slowed to a stop, and I straightened my dress before the doors opened into the parking garage beneath the building. Nate took my hand as we walked to his car, and opened the passenger door for me. Once I was seated, he closed it and walked around to the driver’s side.
“So where are we going?” I asked as he started the engine. “You’ve kept it a secret all week.”
Nate took my hand and kissed it before exiting the garage, but he said nothing.
I moaned with frustration as we eased into traffic, but secretly I loved that he wanted to surprise me. In a few minutes, we pulled up at the Detroit Foundation Hotel, a beautifully restored brick building that had been the Detroit Fire Department’s headquarters in the 1920s, complete with three huge sets of double doors painted bright red across the front. Immediately, one valet opened my door and offered me a hand as I stepped onto the curb. Nate accepted a slip of paper from a second valet, told him we were hotel guests, then came around and took my arm.
“Hotel guests?” I whispered as we headed for the entrance. “Why did you say that?”
Again, Nate only smiled as he opened the door to the restaurant for me. “So many questions,” he said, taking my arm again as we walked in together. “Don’t you trust me to do this right?”
The hostess greeted Nate by name and told him his table was ready. I saw the way her eyes lingered on his handsome features and broad chest, and felt proud to be the one on his arm. “I trust you,” I said, looking up at him as my pulse skittered out of control. It occurred to me that I couldn’t recall the last time I had trusted any man this way.
Once we’d been left alone, I looked at him across the table and realized that for once in my romantic life, everything was falling into place exactly the way I had imagined it. The crowded room, the arm in mine, the candlelight glowing softly between us. Beyond that, there was the beat of my heart, the look in his eye, the feeling that somehow we were doing this right.
We were finding our way.
Fourteen
Nate
The evening was perfect so far, everything I wanted for Emme.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was luminous in the candlelight, her blue eyes on fire, her red lips beckoning. Every time she took a bite of something, I watched her mouth, thinking about all the ways she used it on me. I imagined that red lipstick smeared on my cock, and got so hard I nearly asked for the check before the appetizer was gone. But it wasn’t only her mouth turning me on.
Her hands distracted me too. I’d watch them wrap around her cocktail glass or slowly butter a piece of bread or pop an olive from her martini between her lips, and a memory would hit me from the last two weeks—her fists tightening in my hair, her nails raking down my back, her fingers clutching at my shoulders, my arms, my ass. My hardened flesh sliding against her palms as her tongue stroked my chest, the unabashed way her hands explored every part of me, her fingers seeking out hidden places that made my body tremble and my vision fade. I’d had the most intense orgasms of my entire life with her, and I’d never even taken her to bed. Not properly, anyway.
Tonight would change all that, even if it was only for a couple hours.
Not that it was all about sex with Emme and me. It wasn’t. It never had been. In a way, that would have been much easier for me to deal with. But somehow, right from the start—actually before the start—I had known it would be different with her. She and I already had a connection, and it wasn’t based on sex. So I couldn’t start from there with her and simply keep it at the physical level, which for me was surface level. Things had never been just surface level with Emme. We’d cared about each other before we’d had sex. That was the difference.