Page 38 of Service Included

“You don’t have to be that literal.” He bent to caress the back of her thigh, running his palm up to and over the curve of her butt. She lifted her hips and parted her legs enough to let his hand slip between her thighs. “Go ahead and rub against the mattress.” He spread his fingers until the pressure on her inner thighs shiftedher legs farther. “While you think about what I’m going to stick in your pussy.”

Her brain supplied the image of Nico holding the toy she stored in her dresser, carefully hidden under her workout clothes. The way his big, rough hand would cradle the translucent pink base, how the shaft would rise from his grip, and the way he would use it. Inside her head, the hum in the back of her throat echoed the battery purr, and she could almost feel him pressing that joystick into her, vibrating faster than his tongue could move. The anticipation opened her legs.

“While I go downstairs, you can wiggle—” He did it. He pressed her spot, but no more. “And rock yourself.”

Eros descending from Olympus to seduce her again and again was a fevered dream, a story, a myth. Women like her didn’t pass out from excellent sex, but she hadn’t even fully calmed herself yet from the first—third? Did the magazines count?—time she’d come, and here he was, doing her again.

“But one thing you shouldn’t do.” He slipped a finger inside her while he held down firmly on her clit and issued rules in that sex-drunk voice that set her reeling. “No touching.”

Breathe, Megan. Remember to breathe.

“Don’t touch yourself.”

Chapter 10

The length of the bone

Don’t touch yourself.This was his game, then, giving her one thing not to do, and, of course, that injunction consumed the front and middle and center of her brain, until all she wanted to do was to reach between her own legs and urge his hand to move. Her imagination drove her hips toward the pleasure he withheld, becoming greedy and greedier, until he pulled his hand away.

The tiny sound as his finger left her was her body’s plea for his return.

“Are you paying attention?” His voice was slower, deeper, asserting control.

She shivered.

“Remember, I said don’t touch yourself while I’m gone.” He punctuated his command by smoothing his hand from her buttocks to her lower back.

She felt bumps rising on the backs of her arms, anticipating the next place he would stroke. She pictured him spanking her, his hand coming down on her bare buttock, and the poppingsound igniting the silent room, and she couldn’t help herself. She moaned.

“One rule to follow. Then you’ll get what you want.”

She heard his bare feet pad across the floor. The fucker was leaving her like this.

“No hands.”

She gritted her teeth and muttered into the tensed muscle of her arm. “Screw you.”

He laughed from the doorway. “Deal.”

In his absence, the silence felt like liquid pressing on her bare skin. She closed her legs. Opened them again. She couldn’t seem to find a cool spot as she wiggled into the mattress. She should have asked him to rinse his penis. She wanted to suck him until he was as confused as she was. Her hips made circles against the bed, and she marveled that this morning, she’d been humping a pillow in this exact spot, but now the naked Apollo downstairs had promised to take her again. So much for prophecies.

What the hell was delaying him?

Finally, he returned, carrying a handful of markers and the bottles of water he’d bought earlier. He stopped halfway across the bare wood floor to pose midstride with his weight on his forward leg, as if he were modeling for an artist. His long limbs and tapering triangular shape embodied the classical ideal, and the way he held the pens in front of his body, his elbow bent so that they were almost at chest height, evoked the stance of Polykleitos’s Spear-Bearer, albeit with the modern armament of permanent markers.

While she absorbed Nico’s confidence and his immersion in the moment, her last deeply buried qualm flew away. With this sun-loved man standing in the room, his dark hair cascading to his shoulders and other hair emphasizing places to be further explored, she didn’t care that their anatomy was in charge. She was driven by needs too; women were. A day awash in desireand sex felt magically conjured, a wish fulfilled by the Delphic Oracle. Nothing wrong flowed from admitting and taking what she wanted, even if it was simply sex, especially when he’d been so eager to know she consented and read her needs so closely.

“Like anything you see?” An eyebrow waggle combined with a hip shimmy caused that long thing to sway.

She snorted and sat up. Even if being thirty-five and giggling over a man’s penis was absurd, she excused herself because the way his cock appeared to want to shake hands interfered with her brain function. “Honestly? You remind me a little bit of theDoryphorosof Polykleitos, a statue of a spear-bearer.”

“Is that a step up from the average koo-rose?” His pronunciation ofkouroswas awkward, but he clearly meant the mannequin-like sculptures of nude males who always faced forward with their left leg advanced in front of the rest of their body. He correctly interpreted her surprise. “The internet does include pictures of Greek statues, you know.”

“Oh, you’re a step up from stone.” She let her grin show as her gaze followed his planes and angles. “Most definitely.”

“Keep talking.” He knelt at the edge of the mattress and offered her a water bottle. In his other hand, she saw the red, blue, and black permanent markers, one of which she’d used this morning to write on herself.

When he set them next to the mattress, the words on her arm seemed to tingle. She knew that the markers weren’t here for a packing task.

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