Page 82 of Ache for You (Slow Burn 3)
“I have some free time tomorrow. Say, from five o’clock to five-oh-one?”
“No. Today. And I’ll need more than one minute.”
“You never said anything about timing,” she starts, sounding hostile, but I cut her off.
“A proper kiss takes more than one minute.”
“That sounds ominous. I think we need to discuss the particulars before we go any further.”
The particulars. My mind gifts me with a pornographic Technicolor show of each and every “particular” it wants. I open the top two buttons on my shirt, yanking aside the collar because it’s stifling. “So. Discuss.”
She’s irritated by my curt response. I can tell because she says, “That tone is pissing me off, Count Egotistico.”
I really hate it when she calls me that. I am a fucking marchese. “What doesn’t piss you off?”
“The list is long. It includes all kinds of fun things, like rainbows, puppies, nonassholey men . . .”
“Very funny. I’m not an asshole.”
She mutters, “That’s what they all say.”
I have to force myself to sound nonchalant and in control, though I’m anything but. “Let’s get back to the subject at hand.”
“Sure. One minute and not a second longer. That’s my final offer.”
“Five minutes.”
“What? Who kisses for five minutes straight?”
I growl, “I’d like to kiss you for five hours straight, but we have to start somewhere.”
That shuts her up for a while. Then she groans. “This is so weird.”
“Don’t forget you can tattle on me to my mother if I don’t hold up my end of the bargain.”
“Yeah, there is that.”
She’s imagining all the ways she’ll humiliate me to my mother, I can hear it in her voice. I take advantage of her distraction to press my case. “Four minutes.”
“Ugh. I can’t even look at your face for four minutes at a time, let alone suck on it.”
Remembering how she ogled me while I changed my shirt in my bedroom, I allow myself a smile. “Perhaps you’d rather look at my chest.”
A sound like a snake’s hiss comes over the line. “You know, every time I think you’re not a complete dick, you do something to prove me wrong.”
My smile grows larger. “And we’re back to my dick.”
“I never said anything about your dick!”
“You did. Just then.”
“No, I did not!”
Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am an asshole. Because winding this woman up is so much fun. “I distinctly heard you say the word—”
“Two minutes,” she spits out. “That’s it. Final, final offer.”
Two minutes. Twenty-four kisses. That means her beautiful strawberry mouth is all mine for a total of forty-eight minutes.
