Page 93 of The Accidental Dating Experiment

“Yes, I thought so too,” Monroe retorts.

“You couldn’t actually have offered so she wouldn’t date anyone else,” Sadie says, dry as the desert.

Monroe adopts a thoughtful look. “I mean, I suppose that was a benefit.”

“Yes, just a little one,” our intrepid producer says.

Monroe sneaks a peek at me. One that makes my heart flutter. And my lady parts too. “But at the time, I wanted to help.” Then he laughs, self-deprecatingly. “At least that’s what I told myself. I also couldn’t stand the thought of her dating anyone else.”

“And that wasn’t a tip off to you?” Sadie asks him, incredulous. I’m having a blast watching her both tease him and grill him.

Maybe I’ll get in on the action more. “Yeah, was it?”

“In retrospect,” he grumbles.

“Fine, fine. So you taught her how to date,” Sadie says, sketching air quotes, “By pretending to be other guys? So then, was she kissing you or some other guy?”

Ooh, good question.

“Me. Only me.” His answer is instantaneous and possessive.

Sadie arches a skeptical brow his way. “You sure about that?”

“Positive,” he says. It comes out as a growl.

“But how do you know?”

His eyes narrow, and he stares at me with heat and desire. “Because I do,” he says, answering it in a defiant, but crystal clear way. Then, with his gaze locked on me, he adds, “Because I told her I wanted to. Because I said I wasn’t pretending then. Because we talked and both admitted it was us kissing, us wanting, us connecting.”

It’s said with such passion that I can feel our practice dates all over again, in the form of flutters racing up and down my chest, settling in my core, heating me up.

“It was us,” I say, caught up in the intensity of his admission. “Just us.”

Sadie’s waving a hand in front of her face. “Well, that clears it up, and I suspect we’re going to need to sign off for now since Monroe and Juliet look like they’re about to kick me out of the studio so they can break in this table.”

That breaks us out of our lust tractor beam. I shake off the fog of hormones. Monroe drags a hand through his hair, like he’s trying to clear off a cloud of lust too. “Sounds like we were practice dating as us, after all,” he says.

Sadie smiles like I told you so. “That’s what I was saying.”

Monroe might have started each date pretending to be someone else, but with each one, we learned how to be together. We learned about each other. I’m not sure I saw it that way at the time, but looking back, we were dating each other all along.

“Let’s keep practicing,” I say.

“We will.”

Thirty minutes later, we practice something else entirely in my bedroom. “Deeper,” I urge.

My man drives into me, filling me so much, so fantastically that I arch my back. Pleasure ripples through me, stretching to the ends of me.

And, pleasure radiates in him too. I can tell from his sounds, his breath, and from the view. I’m gazing at the ceiling in my bedroom, where my very handy man indeed installed a mirror earlier this week.

That ass.

That back.

Those legs.

Those shoulders.

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