Page 78 of Business or Pleasure

He gives me a sly look. “Nope. I’m completely free the rest of the day.” Then he lowers his voice, even though we’re the only two people in the room. “I can’t stop thinking about what happened in Reno. Outside the bar. It nearly killed me, how quiet you had to be.”

The memory tugs a groan from my throat. I need him on top of me, his weight pressing me back into the rug. There are still two major topics we haven’t broached yet on the lesson plan, and I’m certain that if I don’t get his mouth between my legs tonight, I might die. I need the reminder that this is just physical.

“The next lesson,” I say with a rush of breath, my mouth an inch from his. “Do you remember—”

His eyes go dark. “As though I didn’t memorize the whole thing the night you sent it to me. Yes, I remember.” He grazes my lips with his. “I thought I told you how badly I wanted to lick you.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, my muscles already tightening. Waiting. Wanting. The last couple times we were together, I was the only one who finished. I want to hear him fall apart and know that I’m the one who unstitched him. Suddenly I’m craving it.

We kiss on top of the blanket, in front of the fireplace, and there’s no going slowly this time. I slide out from under him so I can get on top, rubbing his erection with my palm, then lowering myself down his body so I can kiss him through his boxers. He fists a hand in my hair, swears under his breath. I love him like this: completely surrendered to his own pleasure. Unashamed. I haven’t seen enough of it.

But when I reach for the waistband, he shakes his head. “You first,” he says, and because I don’t know how to argue with that, I pin my shoulder blades to the blanket.

“Tell me what you said in Reno.” Because there was no romance there, only pure physical need.

He blows out a breath when he leans over me, slips his hand inside my underwear. “About how wet I wanted to make you?” An amused chuckle. “I think you’re already there.”

I practically tear my panties in my rush to get them down my legs. “More.”

A hum against my mouth as he parts me with his fingers. “I want you to be loud,” he says, timing his words with his strokes. He draws a circle. A square. A shape that mathematicians haven’t discovered yet. “I want to feel your body tremble, until you just can’t keep it in any longer, and then I want you to come on my tongue.”

I’m gasping now, clutching his shoulders. His finger isn’t enough. I need more.

He lowers his head to my chest, dropping kisses to my abdomen, my thighs. My lips. Then, when I’m squirming and shaking and more than ready for him, he gives me a long, slow lick. I let out a moan at the contact, the hot, slick feel of his mouth on me.

“God, you taste so good.” He keeps teasing, alternating quick strokes with longer, torturous ones. Only when I’m aching for it does he finally take his tongue to my clit, quickly learning that the softest little flicks are enough to drive me wild.

“Finn,” I murmur as he falls into a steady rhythm. “Finn.”

He pauses for a moment. Glances up at me.

“What?” I ask.

“I think that’s the first time you’ve said my name. When we’re like this.”

He’s right—I’ve avoided it. Now I say it again, which makes him sigh and press his mouth against me harder.

For a moment, I can almost forget that he’s Finnegan Walsh and I’m the nameless person writing his book. For a moment, we are just two people with a desperate attraction warming up on a snowy day.

Except, of course, this isn’t real. He’s not doing any of these things because he’s madly in love with me—he’s trying to learn.

So he can eventually please someone who isn’t me.

I still my hand in his hair. “Hold on.” Immediately he stops, glancing up at me. “Sorry, I—I have to pee.”

I haul myself off the floor, untangling myself from the blankets, slipping on a T-shirt—I don’t stop to check whether it’s his or mine—on my way to the bathroom.

Of course it’s his. Of course it fits the way a boyfriend’s shirt should fit, baggy and sexy and perfect.

Get a grip, I tell my reflection once I’ve locked myself inside. My face is flushed, hair wild. You are not having feelings for him.

Two months, and it already feels like I’m deeper than I ever was with Wyatt. It doesn’t make sense. My feelings for Wyatt grew over the course of ten years of friendship, classes and parties and late nights talking about our futures. I tended to that crush like a fussy succulent, giving it all the sunshine it needed to become a full-on invasive species.

With Finn, the way I feel is a fierce and foreign thing.

And that’s fucking terrifying.

I force myself to think about when he was sick and burrowed in his sheets with a pyramid of Kleenex. Nothing about that should be appealing—and yet.

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