Page 85 of Bad Reputation

“Nope.” He ran his hand down her stomach and over the juncture of her thighs.

She twisted against him like a live wire.“Cole.”It was a plea, it was a warning, and it was almost desperate.

But they weren’t alone.

Cole lifted his hand from her body and his mouth from her shoulder. “Will you spend the night with me?” He was asking a lot more than that, a hell of a lot more. And Cole knew that Maggie understood.

Silence.

Then, unsteadily, she answered, “Y-yes.”

Chapter 20

INT. COLE’S HOTEL ROOM—NIGHT

Cole hadn’t even asked “My room or yours.” He simply led Maggie to his suite.

When he opened the door, it was all Maggie could do not to gasp. Her own hotel room was nice, but it could’ve fit inside his suite’s living room twice. In the next room, the streetlight coming in through the windows outlined the bed. It looked massive. Monumental. As if it should have been a stop on the hop-on, hop-off bus for tourists.

It was a bed that carriedexpectations.

Now that they’d made out like teenagers in his town car, Cole’s movements were confident. Feline. The way he moved, the roll of his shoulders, the cock of his hips: it was the most goddamned erotic thing she’d ever seen.

He unfurled himself on the couch. Just poured his body over it, draping one arm along the back of it. “I want to make love to you.”

“I, um, suspected as much.” Honestly, if she hadn’t been acutely aware of Phil in the front seat of the town car, Maggie would’ve ravished Cole already. She’d known they’d had chemistry, but that kiss had been—wow. She’d had entire sexual relationships lasting months or years that had left her less hot and bothered than that single car ride.

“Good. So what gets you off?” The way Cole was watching her was probably illegal in several countries. It was definitely a fire hazard.

Maggie couldn’t make herself sit down. First, there was the problem of where. On the couch next to him? There was no way. She was still recovering from the kiss. Honestly, she wasn’t certain her knees could bend any more. Every cell in her body was still squealing as if she were a personified exclamation point.

She squeezed her thighs together. Nope, that wasn’t enough. Not enough pressure, not enough contact, and not where she needed it.

“You’re blocking this scene in your head?” she joked.

“I’ve been doing that for the last few months.”

Smoke should be pouring from her ears like in an old cartoon. What was she going to say to that? That she hadn’t been doing the same thing? She didn’t want to lie to him. She wasn’t sure she could.

“So you want my sexual history? To know about my fantasies?”

“The second one, yeah.”

Maggie fought an impulse to look away. “I haven’t ... done this in a while. Like a year and a half.” She omitted the vibrator that was in her suitcase. Nothing helped insomnia like a good orgasm or two. “But since I got to the UK, my fantasy has been ... you.”

Cole’s eyes blazed. Realistically, Maggie knew that was ridiculous. That a bonfire hadnot, in fact, flared in his eyes. But in that moment, she would have sworn that it had.

Yeah, whoa, he liked that.

“I understand. Like, exactly. So in the bedroom, what gets you there?”

“It isn’t always penetration,” Maggie admitted, her voice feeling gawky.

It was hard to believe that she’d spent the last seven months learning to be an intimacy coordinator and having no-holds-barred conversations about sexual positions and pleasure and freaking pubic beards with strangers while choreographing and helping to film some pretty steamy on-screen sex. But this felt utterly different. It wasn’t for a scene.It wasn’t for work. It wasn’t about characters. It was real. And she was going to do it.

She was going to do itwith Cole.

Maggie had always been better at directing than she had been at acting because she was extremely self-conscious. Was it possible to get stage fright before sex? Because that seemed like the only explanation for her nerves.

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