Page 67 of Sugar Baby Mine

“Tell me,” he demands with a soft drop of his voice that I feel everywhere as his teeth tease the lobe of my ear, his beard scratching over my neck.

“I’m learning what it feels like to be wanted. Listened to. Worshipped.”

“As you should be. Everyone else who’s had you at the tip of their fingers is an idiot for watching you walk away.”

His lips press into the skin below my ear as he drags my body closer, in between the spread of his thighs until there isn’t anywhere else to go unless I want to climb over his lap.

The way those words curl around me is criminal.

Hooking my hand over the bridge of his arm, I shift forward until my feet touch the floor again. As I stand up between his thighs to lean into the crook of his neck, his lips and fingers drag the collar of my borrowed shirt down my shoulder with a slowness that has me sighing.

“Maybe I’m the idiot for leaving,” I say, without meaning the words at all.

His lips flutter along my skin, paving a line back up my throat that has searing heat scoring through my bones. Then his hand shifts from holding onto my thigh to wrap around my neck, each one of his fingers laying delicately as he pushes me back just enough to look at me.

“Everything you’ve done has led our paths to cross, and I will always be thankful for that.”

I like to think I will, too.

His thumb swipes back and forth over the side of my throat, and I blink away the fog that’s taken harbor in my brain.

“Where do you go in that head of yours?”

“Most of the time? Nowhere good.”

“Well, I’ll be here waiting whenever you come back. Just tell me what you need.”

“I appreciate that,” I say, before reaching around him and grabbing my coffee.

“I appreciate that you didn’t leave this morning before I woke up,” Ben says pointedly. “Normally I wake up at seven and head to the gym and am in the office by nine, but I set my alarm for five-thirty today just in case you tried to pull a fast one again.”

“You set your alarm forfive-thirty? That’s disgusting.”

He laughs. “You didn’t even budge when it went off.”

“Why were you so obsessed with walking me out the door today?”

He gets up from his seat, collecting our empty plates and putting them in the sink. “I wanted to make sure you got your money. I forgot to give it to you yesterday before we got busy.”

Once we got back to his apartment, we were a little occupied I guess.

Ben pulls out his wallet and presses six hundred dollars cash into my palm.

Suddenly, it feels like I’m holding all I’m worth right in my hand, even if it’s not the truth.

Chapter 17

Ben has business in fuckingVenicethis week. Some meeting with a client to go over plans for a renovation thatapparentlycan’t be done over a Teams meeting. Sounds mafia coded to me.

And he wanted me to come with him. To Italy.

So I went from never having been on a plane to a nine-hour flight across the ocean pretty quickly. Tequila and iced coffee got me through the night flight, at least. And I’m glad I said yes, glad that Ben wanted me to come with him, because I’m not sure I would have ever made it here if I’d never met him.

Which would be a shame, because this country is beautiful.

The smell of the sea, the splitting canals and all the boats, and gondolas, and people walking the streets. And the architecture is gorgeous. The only reason I’m fawning over it more than Ben is because he’s been here before. Show off.

The first thing we did after getting off the plane was take a water taxi down into Venice and through the Grand Canal. Our hotel is right on the water, a tall balconied building and the epitome of what you’d envision when someone says Italy. I love it.

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