I almost took her up on the offer.
Finally, with a curse, I bent, picked her up in a cradle hold, and made a quick dash for her room.
Like I was holding flames in my bare hands, and the quicker I could put them down, the less I’d burn us both.
Her heavy breasts were crushed, warm and delicious, against my chest.
I was so hard I was grinding my teeth.
I set her on the bed as gently as I could which meant I practically threw her on it.
She landed on her back and bounced a bit, her pink rosebud nipples still out and teasing me outrageously.
I watched, knees close enough to touch the mattress, hands in my hair.
It was madness.
She was looking up at me, her lush lips quirked enigmatically. “You’re so funny,” she told me. “I think you’re secretly a nice guy.”
“Oh, Ro, you innocent little thing. I am not nice at all. All of the depraved ways I could corrupt you. All of the filthy things I could do to you.”
“You could talk me to death.” It was a taunt, and she had the nerve to giggle after she said it.
“This isn’t a laughing matter,” I told her sternly.
“Sure it is.”
I couldn’t help it, in spite of my discomfort and frustration, I smiled fondly at that. “Even when you’re being impossible, I get a real kick out of you, you know that?” I asked her. “Now do you need anything before I go? Want me to pull your hair? I mean, hold it back while you throw up?”
She was laughing, and I was still smiling as I went into her closet.
It was absolute torture but I determinedly put her into an oversized T-shirt and untied all the strings on her bikini.
I stepped back. “Now throw the bathing suit on the floor. I don’t want you getting tangled up in it while you sleep.”
She obeyed, but in the worst way possible, practically taking off the shirt and giving me a real show that, even trying my best, I could not look away from.
The tips of my fingers were trembling.
When the bikini was a heap on the ground by the bed, I handed her some panties.
“You’re adorable,” I told her softly, tenderly. “Now I need to get the hell away from you.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I DIDN’T SLEEP. I paced the house, jerked off several times, and drove myself crazy until morning.
When she woke up I was there with coffee, and I got the treat of seeing her utterly hungover, paying for all of her sins of the day before.
“Do you remember anything from yesterday?” I asked her, parking myself at her hip.
She was sitting up, looking out of sorts and disoriented. She took a long draw of her coffee and just looked at me. She wasn’t drunk, but she wasn’t quite back to being the Ro I missed yet.
“I remember,” she finally said slowly. “I drank too much, but I didn’t black out or anything. You were being crazy.”
I glared at her. “I was being crazy? I was being crazy? I saw your nipples, Ro, both of them.”
She didn’t laugh but got a vaguely amused look in her eyes, an ironic twist to her mouth that was the most Ro thing I’d seen in almost twenty-four hours.
I loved it. It was a bit worrisome how much I’d missed that look.
“Would it have been better if it was only one?” she finally asked wryly.
“Yes. Both was overkill. No more bikinis for you,” I decided on the spot.
Her eyes narrowed. “You are not going to tell me how to dress.”
“I just did.”
“You know what? I’m not fighting with you right now.”
“Hey!” I exclaimed. “Fighting is just an angry way of caring, you know.”
I waited for one of her pithy comebacks.
She wasn’t playing. She pointed at her door. “Give me some privacy. I need to get dressed.”
I sighed and got up. “Come see me when you’re dressed. We need to talk.”
She took her sweet time. I was in my office staring at my computer screen when she finally showed up.
“We have a problem,” I told her.
She sat down on my sofa. “We do?” she asked, sounding disinterested, like things were business as usual, and I was just going to send her on some unpleasant but relatively normal errand.
I got up and joined her, sitting right next to her and looking straight into her eyes.
I wanted to touch her. Would she be warm? Would she lean into my touch, or would she recoil?
I took off her glasses, and she tried to snatch them back.
I set them on a side table out of her reach. “You’re nearsighted. You don’t need them for this conversation.”
I gazed deep into her eyes, brushing her hair back from her face.
She looked highly suspicious and vaguely offended. It was probably a fair reaction for what I was about to say. What I quite simply couldn’t keep myself from saying.
I was shaking a bit. That’s how much I couldn’t keep it in.
What the hell was wrong with me?
She was driving me crazy. No design for it on her part, but that somehow made it all the more irresistible.
I couldn’t seem to stop myself from harassing the poor girl.
“You can wear bikinis,” I finally began with. “That was out of line, me telling you what to wear.”
“Gee, thanks, I was real worried about it,” she responded, exactly on brand.
I smiled. It was out of hand. I’d never wanted so much to fuck someone for their personality in my life.
I tried to keep my body calm as I searched for how to start this little headfirst dive into insanity that I had decided on over the long, sleepless night.
“We need to be face to face for this, no craning our heads sideways to look at each other,” I mused out loud.
“What are you talking about?”
In answer, I picked her up and arranged her on top of me, straddling my lap.
She was wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and I was wearing close to the same thing, and the two materials together weren’t thick enough to keep me from feeling her taut flesh underneath. Our lower bodies were flush just how and where they needed to be.
God, I wanted her.
She put her hands against my chest, palms almost cupping my pecs. I didn’t think it was deliberate but my cock didn’t care about her intentions. “What are you doing?” she asked slowly.
“You know I’m your boss,” I began. It wasn’t the best start, but I was having a hard time finding the right words.
Her lips parted ever so slightly, going from pursed to lush. Her eyelids drifted down, making her eyes darken, and like a light switch going off, her entire expression went from serious to sultry.
I was lost.
I took a deep breath, then another, my need rising up to the surface until I was choking on it.
She mumbled something.
“Huh?” I said.
“Your hands,” she muttered. She pushed against me and budged me not an inch.
“My hands?” Oh that. They were full of her delectable ass, keeping her flush against me, my die hard erection trying to drill its way through our clothes and into her soul.
“Your hands are on my butt, boss.”
I removed them with great effort.
“See?” I said in a less than steady voice. “There you go. Was it really so hard to call me boss?”