Page 31 of Illicit Illustration

But then I noticed his lingering look at the remote clenched tightly in my hand, and it was a rude awakening that yet again I’d gotten distracted by the moment and wasn’t taking pictures like I was supposed to. Using my thumb to depress the button, I watched Reid as he continued following the motions of the man in my ear,touching me where he touched her, pressing his hips into me when the hero pressed his into hers.

“Good girl,” he whispered, moments before the hero echoed the same words, but there was no way he could have known that he was going to say them.

This suddenly felt way more complicated than it’d felt even yesterday, because it didn’t feel like Reid was faking the way he touched me, especially when his thumb settled over the damp panel of my panties, pressing in and making me gasp, my back arching at the same time the heroine’s did in the story.

Rocking my hips into his subtle movements, I tried to keep myself from spiraling, but I couldn’t help it, my pulse racing as I barreled toward a very familiar yet also unfamiliar sensation. Not that I hadn’t come before, I wasn’tthatinexperienced. It was that I’d never comewithsomeone.

Fumbling high school boys and my only boyfriend in college had never actually gotten me there, and I’d been too embarrassed to tell them they hadn’t quite completed the task with their mediocre attempts at third base. That was probably why I’d never let things progress further. What was the point of them stealing home if they were only going to be scoring a run for the home team? Okay, maybe my baseball metaphors needed a bit of work. But who could blame a girl when an extremely hot, leather pants wearing, tattooed God was between her thighs going where no man had gone before.

Reid was getting me there embarrassingly quickly, with only a few strategically placed motions of the pad of his thumb on top of my panties. I wasn’t sure if he knew what his thumb placement was doing; he was just listening to the directions in his ears. But when I gasped, my back arching and my hair flowing out behind me over the handlebars like a waterfall of fire, there was no way he didn’t realize that he’d just given me a very real—very unexpected—happy ending.

When I came back to earth, my eyes widened as the narrator was about to bend the heroine over the side of his bike, the soundof him unbuckling his belt pushing me into action. Ripping the earbud out of my ear, I threw myself forward and grabbed the one out of Reid’s, clasping them both tightly in my hand.

“Hey,” his deep voice whispered, a certain amount of mirth in his tone. “That was just getting to the good part. Maybe I wanted to finish.”

My eyes widened even further at the thought of himfinishing.

“Not like that. I wanted to finish listening, dirty girl,” he teased, his laughter jostling me against his chest.

“Not gonna happen,” I giggled nervously, enjoying it entirely too much as his long fingers danced up my spine and dug into my loose hair. They massaged my scalp, and I fought the urge to rub up against his chest like a cat. It was bad enough I’d just rubbed mykittyall over the pad of his thumb until I came. “I think we’re done here.”

“Do we have to be?” he asked, tracing his nose along the side of my cheek and resting his lips on the sensitive skin behind my ear. He wasn’t quite kissing me, but this didn’t feel like how friends should touch each other. And that’s all we were.

Friends.We were friends. Friends don’t hump other friends, right? Well, except friends with benefits, but judging by the last two encounters we’d had, Reid wasn’t getting any benefits.

Not that I hadn’t imagined giving them to him.

“Reid,” I whispered breathily, my fingers creeping up his chest and brushing over one of the piercings I’d discovered were sensitive yesterday.

He growled, his fingertips digging into my skin. “Don’t say my name like that, kitten. It makes me want to do bad things to you. And you’re not mine.”

“I’m not anyone’s,” I replied softly, enjoying the way he shuddered as I played with the ball on the end of the barbell beneath my thumb.

“Not yet.” It was so quiet I wasn’t sure if he meant for me to hear it, but it had me disentangling myself and sliding off the side of the bike anyway. He'd been right. There was someone else. And itwasn’t fair of me to be behaving like I had been. But I didn’t want to stop. With either of them.

Reid was quiet behind me as I got dressed, and when I turned around, I figured out why, because he was nowhere to be seen.

The scene of the crime was still there though, the tripod with the camera still aimed at his bike, the sunlight streaming in the window backlighting the tableau. I pressed the button still clasped in my hand, the camera beeping instead of making the quiet click it normally did.

Growling under my breath, I stalked to the camera, flicking open the compartment for the memory card, but I already knew it wouldn’t be there. Reid had stolen it before he escaped, sort of like he was stealing my will to resist him with every moment we spent together.

Part of me wished I’d never decided to stop avoiding him, but the other part was reminded why I hadn’t when he walked toward me a few moments later.

We were both quiet as we picked up the equipment, packing things away and putting on our coats. Reid brushed my fingers away as I tried to line up the parts of my zipper, pulling it up for me and running his thumb along the side of my cheek before he turned and walked back to his bike.

I held the back door open for him as he wheeled it outside into the parking lot. Quietly taking his hand after he’d gotten his equipment strapped to the back of the bike, I climbed on behind him before we each put on our own helmets.

Wordlessly, I wrapped my arms around him, and he took off, his bike navigating the trip back over the ridge much quicker than I would have liked.

Reid was silent as I climbed off the back, pulling off his extra helmet and handing it to him before I made a beeline for the back door of the bar without a backward glance.

The engine revved behind me, and I turned in time to see him gun it out of the parking lot and toward the mountains, clearly eager to get away from whatever had happened between us earlier.I knew we were skating very close to the line of taking things too far, but I also didn’t really care.

Which wasn’t like me. I over thought everything. I should have been freaking out, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to do something fun for once. And it’d been a hell of a lot of fun to strip down and have Reid lay me out over his bike as a very naughty audiobook played simultaneously in our ears.

Trying not to obsess about it, I escaped into my studio, sketching out the rough outline of the scene we’d made earlier. I’d have to fine tune it once he sent me the pictures.Ifhe sent me the pictures this time. Maybe he was regretting volunteering to help me with this project after all.

But as I laid down my digital pencil and opened my email app, the pictures were waiting for me. There wasn’t any witty commentary in the subject line or body of the email, but knowing Reid, I unlocked the screen of my phone and opened our text thread.

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