“Twenty-four,” he repeats softly. Then, he cocks his head. “One wonders how mortal men will be able to compete.”
“Mm-hmm. Maybe it’s dangerous for me to get used to it,” I say. The comment slips out before my brain catches on that I’m not talking with one of my girlfriends back home.
I’m rewarded with another raised eyebrow. “Or you’ll just have to date better men. Vibrating ones,” Nate says.
“Have you ever met one?”
“Those with great imagination can do anything,” he says. There’s a curve to his lips now and a glittering in his eyes. It makes something in my stomach tighten. “Toys don’t have to be just for solo play.”
I reach for another grocery bag because his gaze on me is too much. My fingers graze a cardboard package of eggs. “Interesting. I didn’t look around in that section of the store too much. The couple’s… section.”
Out of the corner of my eye, Nate looks large. Tall. He’s turning an eggplant in his hands, much like he did my vibrator. “That’s a shame. It’s the most fun section.”
“Is it? Maybe I should explore it. In the future.”
“In the future,” he repeats. “When I’ve successfully been your wingman.”
I run a hand over my hair and push back the loose tendrils. “You’re talking like someone who’s… familiar with that side of the store.”
He shrugs and tosses the eggplant into his other hand. “That vibrator wouldn’t have been my first sex toy purchase.”
“Are you implying that this was mine?”
He grins, crookedly and a bit wolfishly. “Wasn’t it?”
I reach forward and grab the vegetable from his large hands. “Yes, but I don’t like that it’s so obvious.”
Nate chuckles. “It was a lucky guess.”
“Sure, sure,” I say. But I feel too hot; blush is spreading across my cheeks.
And while I cook dinner, and as the conversation flows, on the kitchen island between us, is the incriminating purple box.
Nate
I can’t fall asleep.
The moment I turned off the lights and closed my eyes, the conversation we had earlier started replaying in my head.
The discussion over dinner. The easy chit-chat and her curious questions. She asked me things I can’t remember having ever been asked before. Did I like living in London? What do I miss most about New York? My favorite way to eat potatoes.
She’d asked the last question while stabbing her fork into an oven-roasted potato, and with the full intensity of someone who’s clearly given it a lot of thought.
But the talk about her vibrator that preceded it all… It had set off emotions I’d tried hard to keep under wraps.
So I’m lying on my back in this large bed, staring at the ceiling, and thinking about her vibrator. The length. The breadth. The girth.
The damn vibrations.
And I’m wondering if she’s using it right now.
Just a floor below me, separated by a single flight of stairs, in the guest bedroom I passed a million times and a million mornings before she moved in.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but that doesn’t do a thing to dissolve a mental image. My imagination lingers on Harper, her messy curls spread across a pillow, her full lips parted on a soft sigh.
Naked.
Her knees bent, slightly splayed, and her hand working between her thighs. Maybe she’d warm herself up first without the vibrator. And then turn it on, slide the device over the soft skin of her stomach, and press it to her clit…