Page 51 of A Ticking Time Boss

“That’s terrible luck,” I say.

“Maybe, or maybe it’s me,” Audrey says. “I think I need more than just some polite small talk to know if I want to be… close to someone.”

I smile at my ceiling lamp. You and every woman, I think. “That’s not odd.”

“It’s not? Feels like it is.” There’s a shuffle on the other end and I imagine her turning over. Tucking her arm under her head.

“Say you met someone you connected with. You went out with them, had a great time. You found out he read the newspaper, and not just digitally.”

“You remember?”

“Of course,” I say. Her criteria for men. “What would you want him to do?”

Her voice is low. “Kiss me.”

“You like being kissed,” I say. The words feel hot on my tongue, and I know what I’m doing, and I know I should stop. I’m also more likely to be hit by a meteorite or be nominated as a presidential candidate.

But then Audrey takes it one step further. “I love being kissed,” she says. “I like having sex, you know. I don’t want you to think I don’t, just because I’m not… experienced with relationships.”

She said sex, she brought it up, and my mind floods with images. It’s not like I haven’t imagined it before. How she’d look beneath me, my arms on either side of her face. How the soft insides of her thighs would feel clutched around my head. If she’d whimper when I pushed inside.

“You like having sex,” I repeat. The words send an instant ache up my thighs.

“I do,” she whispers. “Don’t you?”

Banal conversation. Banal, and absurd, and my hand glides down to stroke the hardening outline of my cock through my pants. “It’s one of my favorite activities,” I say.

With you, though, it would be worship.

“Think we’d have good sex?” Audrey asks. Her voice is small, but also determined, and I go rock hard in a second. It happens so fast I get a brief flash of lightheadedness.

I can’t believe she’d brought up us and fucking.

“Carter?” she says. “Ignore me.”

As if I could. “I think we’d have great fucking sex.”

Her breathing catches on the other line and I close my eyes. Imagine her sitting across from me, watching the flush creep up on her cheeks. “We would, wouldn’t we,” she murmurs. “Even if it might be awkward at first.”

I chuckle darkly. “It won’t be awkward.”

“It often is, the first time,” she says, and I experience a brief and violent impulse to kill every man she’s referring to in that statement. It passes, and what I’m left with is a burning desire to prove her wrong.

“It can be. Won’t be for us, though.”

“Oh?” Her voice is a caress in my ear. “What do you think we’d do?”

“If you want me to go there, I will. But fair warning.”

“Wait,” she says. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

I can’t believe she didn’t stop me. Adrenaline and something else, something darker, pulses through my veins.

Her voice is a whisper in my ear, along with the rustling of fabric. “I’m back.”

“Did you just get into bed?”

“Yes,” she says. “Is that… okay?”

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