Her body feels impossibly slight in my grasp, like smoke that will disappear if I hold too hard. But her hair—God, her hair. It does not care that she is trying to make herself small; it’s a perfect bronze cloud, tickling my nose, curling gently into my skin.
Her shoulders shake against me. The sound of her worry and her grief carve themselves into my skin, leaving marks I’m not sure will be gone by morning.
“Bea.” I tilt her tear-stained face up with my thumb and forefinger. “Tell me what’s wrong. Why have you called me here tonight? Why are you hurting?”
“I’m embarrassed,” she says, her cheeks a deep red. “I mean, I know I should have gone downstairs to the bar. That makes way more sense than paying someone to have sex with me.”
“Why didn’t you?” I’m genuinely curious.
She speaks into my chest, her voice muffled. “I did. Five nights in a row, I wore this dress and went downstairs. Every night someone would send me a drink.”
My voice is softer now. “Did you accept?”
“I tried to. I took a sip and gave them a smile when they sat down at the stool next to me. But it was too real somehow. Like they would expect something more than… you know.”
“Sex,” I say, with gentle encouragement.
“Sex,” she repeats.
The word sends a soft breath of heat into my cock. God, this woman. Even hearing her say the word is enough to make me hard, what will it feel like to peel the black dress from her body? To hear her moans and sighs and a thousand other sounds?
“I have no expectation,” I tell her. “Not even sex. If you want to sit with me and recite nursery rhymes, that is what we’ll do. Or if you’d like me to leave. However…”
She looks at me, hope in her green eyes. “However?”
“However, it would be an honor to take you to bed tonight.”
“Even though I haven’t done it before?”
Especially because of that.
So much that it terrified me before, when she first told me. But I’ve had time to consider it over dinner, and besides the caveman-like effect it has on my body, how hard she makes me, it makes sense that I should be the one to do this.
One of those assholes at the bar, what if they don’t make her come? What if they demand more from her than she wants to give? No, the way to make this good for her is to do it myself.
Even though I haven’t done it before?
“Even though,” I tell her, my voice grave.
She smiles, then, the parting of clouds. “My friend Harper said this would be a thousand times more awkward than a one-night stand, but it’s not. It’s easier. Is that wrong?”
“It’s perfectly right.”
I said it to reassure her, but I’m the one reassured when I stroke my thumb across her cheek. It feels perfectly right to bend my head and breathe in the faint smell of lavender. Perfectly right to press my mouth against her plush lips.
She opens her mouth with an acquiescent sigh, and I know she’s still finding this easier. The men downstairs, none of them could have given her this. There’s seduction in my movements, but confidence too. The kind of confidence that can only come knowing I can please her.
An entire city of men who would have had her, who would have been happy for the privilege of a single night, no money exchanging hands, and she paid for me.
I wasn’t lying to her before. It will be an honor.
Chapter Four
Her freckles don’t taste like anything. I know that, but I can’t stop kissing them. Can’t stop following the reckless trail across her cheek and below her jaw. I swear there’s stardust in them, something elemental and bright. They singe my lips, my tongue.
She makes a sound of surprise, a strangled little gasp in her throat. “Is this regular? I thought it would be more like…”
“More like what?” I don’t pause to give her time to answer. She must find the wherewithal even while I move my body closer to hers. Her hands flutter against my shoulders, not pushing me away, not pulling me close. They are confused, those hands.
“Like the movies.”
That makes me stop. I pull back so I can look into her pale green eyes. Jade, I realize. They’re the color of jade, the kind of stone you would hang on a gold chain. “What movies?”
This level of red, it’s an emergency. Her cheeks burn. “You know.”
“Do you watch porn, darling?”
“Only for instructional purposes,” she says, too fast.
I do not laugh. I think I should get a medal for not laughing at this. “And what did you learn from the porn movies you watched?” I ask, quite seriously.
“Usually they…you know. The clothes come off.”
Naturally I am desperate to know what sort of clothes came off. Was there a nurse’s uniform? Or perhaps a man dressed as a burglar, come to tie her up? “Do you want to take off your clothes?”
“No,” she says on a squeak.
Of course not. Because she isn’t ready for that, despite the dubious education porn movies have given her. She’s practically vibrating with nervousness. “Then you’ll keep your clothes on. For now. For as long as you want them. You’re safe with me.”
Her eyes focus with puzzlement. “Safe?”
It’s the reason she stays in this tower, this princess with red hair. Because it’s safe. And that’s what I must be, if I’m to be allowed to stay. “Safe,” I say. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
She looks reluctant, biting her lip.
“No matter what you say, I won’t be angry. Cross my heart.”
“I’m worried you aren’t really aroused,” she says, fast. “That you’re faking it.”
It’s not the first time a woman has ever worried about that with me, but it is the first time I’ve been as desperate to get a woman naked. That she doubts me now is a great irony. “What makes you think that?”
“In the movies, they always show the— the—”
“You don’t think my cock is hard?”
She flushes. “I mean, it doesn’t have to be.”
Now I can’t help but laugh. A full belly laugh. When is the last time I had one of these? There are tears at the corner of my eyes. I turn her around, making her face the small countertop with its fancy espresso maker. She’s right up against it, her tummy pressed to the curved stone ledge. Then I cover her with my body, my throbbing cock between her sweet ass cheeks, the only barriers her clothes and mine.
She stiffens with a small gasp. “That is—”
“Do you see what you do to it? You make it hard. So hard it hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” I murmur. “Never apologize for that. It’s all a man can dream of, a woman making him so hard it hurts. Only letting him touch her over her clothes. Dying for a glimpse of bare skin.”
She moans a little. “This isn’t like the movies.”
I press my lips to the small patch behind her ear. “No, it’s not like the movies. This is real life, and that’s why you called for me, isn’t it? Because the movies were not real.”