by J. J. Murray
Oh, I have plenty of fears, trust me.
“I know this is going to sound cliché, but you make me feel like a man.” He moves a stray lock from my forehead.
“And Corrine doesn’t?”
“No. She doesn’t make me feel anything.”
I want to tell him that he makes me feel. I want to tell him that I need him to feel every inch of my body. “So if Corrine is good for business, what am I good for?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says.
I probably will. I have a horrible headache.
“You’re good for business and, um, pleasure, Shari. You’re the perfect mix of both.” He kisses my forehead. “You make me smile. Just being with you today did my heart some good, even when we were arguing. You are an amazing woman, truly amazing.”
I look up at his lips. I want to kiss him so bad for saying such amazing things about me. “You’re ... pretty amazing, too. I have never ...”
No. Don’t tell him anymore. He already knows too much, and he’s already seen too much.
“Never what?”
Don’t.
“Nothing.” I rest my head against his chest.
He stares down at me. “Never what?”
Can I trust him not to laugh? I sigh. “I have never been with anyone but Bryan. He’s been my, um, one and only.”
Tom doesn’t react at all. “Tell me about Bryan.”
I’m in a god’s arms, and he wants me to talk about Bryan. What is up with this man? “You don’t want to hear about him.”
“Sure I do,” he says. “He’s my competition.”
Not at this moment. “He’s just a very good friend.” Whom I occasionally sleep with. Hmm. I am such a beautiful mess. “Bryan wants to drag me back to Virginia to marry me.” I snuggle closer to Tom. “And I don’t want to be dragged.”
“I can’t imagine any man dragging you anywhere,” he says.
This man knows me. I look up at his face. “He’s, um, Bryan’s coming to visit me this Friday.”
He laughs. “You’re having a busy week.”
Aren’t I? “I’m going to break it off completely with him.” This feels right. It has to be done. “I’m going to tell him that I found somebody.”
“Who?”
I hide in his chest again. “You. I hope.”
He runs his fingers through my hair, and I get goose bumps down to my pinkie toes. “You hope correctly, Shari Nance.” He hugs me, kissing my forehead. “I’ve been hoping for someone like you. If I had known that I was talking to the perfect woman for five years, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time.”
“I’ve wasted about twelve years with Bryan,” I say.
His body jolts. “Twelve?”
Why’d he say that louder? “Much more off than on,” I say quickly.
He shakes his head. “Twelve years?”
Yeah. It does sound jacked up. I slide my booty onto his legs and sit in his lap. “I’m cold.”
He surrounds me with great big arms.
I could get used to this. “Yeah, um, since we were kids.”
“I’ve known very few people in my life for twelve years,” he says. “Wow.”
I am sensing Tom pulling away. I can’t let him do that. “I should call Bryan and save him the trip, but ...” I sigh. “He’ll probably come up to New York anyway to hear it from me in person. He’s old school like that.” And why was I holding on to Bryan again? Oh yeah. I was afraid to be alone, even though I was four hundred miles away from him and really didn’t need or miss him. That’s jacked up, too. “I, um, kept Bryan around while I was waiting for someone better, someone better didn’t show up, so I held on to almost as good.”
“You have a wonderful way with words.”
“Thank you.” But they’re sad words. Man, I’ve wasted some serious time here. “I, um, Tom, you’re someone better. You’re the best.”
“I’m not the best.”
“Yes, you are. Any other man would have taken advantage of me like I’m sure I wanted you to.” Geez, I told him I was juicy! “And you didn’t. You respected me.” I rub my head on his chest. “You protected me from myself.”
“I would always protect you, Shari,” he says. “But that doesn’t make me the best. I’m really pretty ordinary.”
And he’s humble. That is so sexy. “If I say you’re the best, Mr. Sexton, you’re the best. God blessed you with outstanding good looks, charm”—buns, abs, and body of steel—“and the softest brown eyes... .” I can’t stop smiling. Maybe it’s the effect of the alcohol, or maybe it’s the alcohol’s effect wearing off. Either way, I’m smiling.
He smiles. “I like your eyes, too. How, um, blind are you?”
“Not very.”
“I really do think your glasses make you look sexy. Something about the way they make your pretty brown eyes bigger.”
I look at my hands. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a romantic.”
“You’re pretty romantic yourself.”
I’m just all out of practice. “What do we do now?” I take his hands and hold them to my stomach, which isn’t feeling so hot. “We’re obviously compromised on this competition.”
He squeezes my hands. “No, we aren’t.”
I lean back. “How aren’t we? We’re seeing each other again after tonight, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
That’s right. This isn’t a one-night thing. Man, his hands are so big! I put one on my stomach, and my stomach disappears. “This is kind of like snuggling with the enemy, though, Tom. You can’t go to war with the person you’re snuggling with. It is just not done.” Why do these sound like movie lines? I watch too many movies.
“Ever see Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib?”
“No.” I rub his legs. “I’ve seen a lot of movies, though, just not that one.”
“They’re both lawyers, and while he prosecutes a woman who killed her husband, she defends the woman in court and at home. And despite their differences and a bunch of verbal fights, they still love each other.”
“Good thing we don’t have any differences.” Inside, where it counts. “So what you’re saying is that ...” I squint. “You’re saying we can still snuggle, and maybe more.” I give myself goose bumps. “And we can still be competitors?”
He pulls my hips closer to him, my booty firmly planted on a very nice, firm spot. “That’s why I wanted you to join me in our own ad agency. Then we can do this ... and maybe more.”
I like that phrase. “Maybe more” has so many possibilities.
“And we’ll work late together,” he whispers, “and travel together and eat out together.”
“We’ll never get anything done,” I whisper. Why am I whispering? Geez, I want to grind on him so badly! C’mon, God, I’m three years from thirty, my sexual peak.
He moves his hands to my hands, holding them gently. “Is never getting anything done such a bad thing?”
I’m almost panting. “It is when you have a huge monthly rent bill.” I want to arch my back and grind on him, but I don’t. I want to do so many things with this man.
“Two can live much more cheaply than one.” He pulls me even closer.
Doesn’t he know that he’s driving me crazy? “I like my space.” I like this space, too. He surrounds me, but I feel no claustrophobia.
He kisses the top of my head. “I’d give you your space.”
“I like my freedom.”
He drops his head and looks me in the eyes. “I’d give you all the freedom you needed.” He kisses my lips lightly. “I’d even give you an entire bedroom of your own at my house in Great Neck.”
We’ve just kissed. My stomach is fluttering. I hope it’s from the kiss and not the wine. “Is it a big house?”
He kisses my cheek, oh so softly. “It’s more of a bungalow, and it’s only half paid for. The taxes are ridiculous, but ...”
And then we kiss for real, his hand holding my chin, and it’s the kiss y
ou’ve wished for since you were first hitting puberty and noticed that boys were sort of cute sometimes when they weren’t being so stupid, and it’s a real, deep, soul-stirring, tears-causing, toe-curling kiss that sends shivers up and down your spine and back again and makes you want to sing “A Whole New World” while soaring on a flying carpet.
So I liked Aladdin.
It was that kind of a kiss.
I am never leaving this room.
Ever.
I am never leaving this man’s arms.
Ever.
Shoot.
I have to pee.
Chapter 17
I break lip-lock and roll out of his lap. I go into the bathroom, do my business for a very long time, wash my hands, and return to the couch, moving as far away from him as I can, squirming my toes under the cushion.
“Why are you way over there, Shari?” Tom asks.
I’m hiding. “I can’t think objectively about anything if I’m touching or kissing you, okay?”
He, too, moves farther away from me. “Neither can I.”
That didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. He was supposed to come down here to keep me from thinking.
I lean into the arm of the couch and catch my breath. “Tom, we barely know each other.” Okay, I know I let him see most of me. “I’ve only been a voice on the phone for five years and a person for you to follow around for the last two. And now you’re asking me to change my life completely. You’re asking me to jump, and it sounds like you’re asking me to jump over to Great Neck.” Well, maybe he is. I know I’m jumping to a pretty big conclusion here. “Tom, I love Brooklyn. I don’t want to leave it.”
“So you’ll keep your apartment. We can commute. Weekdays in Brooklyn, weekends in Great Neck.”
That sounds ... doable. And logical. But way too fast. Shacking up after truly only knowing each other in the flesh for one day. It’s crazy!
Only I don’t want to stop him, especially the flesh part. I need my life to start now!
“I’ve been scouting out locations for an office,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe how many empty floors there are in Manhattan alone. But we wouldn’t need an entire floor. We wouldn’t even need a real office. We could work out of your apartment or out of my house.”
This is starting to sound less like a spur-of-the-moment proposal. He has really thought a lot of this out. But working out of my tiny apartment? We’d bump into each other every two minutes. . . which does have its advantages, but ...
“What about a production crew?” I ask.
He smiles. “You’re looking at him.”
“Right.”
“I have many skills.”
Whoo. I’ll bet he does. Sorry, Lord. He has to. Just look at him! You made him that way.
“As I told you, Shari, I’m doing this project old school. Pen, ink, camera, Photoshop if necessary. I have all the machines in the studio at my house. My gear isn’t as high-tech as what the real professionals have, but I know how to use what I have. And we can be old school together.”
“I don’t know, Tom. I’m ...” I hesitate. “I don’t have any artistic skills or technical skills.”
“You have art in your bones, Shari.”
This from a man who’s seen most of my bones. I’m blushing.
“It’s in your blood, Shari. And you have fresh ideas, and they’re fresh because you haven’t been infected by an ad agency that promotes crap and calls it gold.”
“MultiCorp shines up a lot of crap, too,” I say. I sigh. “I just don’t ... know. You know?”
“No.”
“No more no’s!”
“I like your nose.”
I like his nose. I want it nuzzling me. “Are you this witty all the time or are you only witty after, um ...” How to put this into one phrase? Hmm. “Are you only witty after drawing a semi-naked drunk woman, putting her to bed, not taking advantage of her, telling her you’ve been protecting her from afar, and then giving her the best kiss she’s ever had?”
“Yes.”
Good answer. The only answer. “Do you mind if I think it all over?”
“I expect you to. No deadline, no pressure.”
Man, he is like a fresh, cool breeze on a hot day. “Thank you.”
He turns slightly.
I hop up onto my arm of the couch.
He laughs. “I’m not coming down there.”
“You, um, startled me.” I like this coy part of me. I think I should expand on it.
“Just know, Miss Shari Nance, that I am going to kick your pretty, sexy booty all over that conference room next week.”
“You wish,” I say, wishing he was kissing on me some more.
“Well, let’s put a wager on it.”
Another bet? I want to win this one. “Okay. When I win the account, you have to ... do what we just did, even the drawing. There are other parts of my body I’ve never seen.” I smile. “You can even use a magnifying glass if you want.”
“So if you win,” he says, “I have to snuggle with you and maybe more.”
I nod. I also want to drop the “maybe.”
“And I get to draw more of your sexy body.”
Hmm. Yeah. It doesn’t sound like much of a hardship for him. Or me. “And ...” Hmm. A bet we both can win? I like it. “No. That’s it.”
“Okay,” he says, his hand sneaking across the couch, which is silly. That hand could never sneak anywhere, as big as it is. “When I win the account, you’ll have to quit MultiCorp and join my new ad agency.”
He has a one-track mind. “You’d hire a loser?” I ask.
“I’d hire my favorite rival.”
“And what would be the name of this new agency? Sexton Nance or Tom and Shari?”
His body follows that hand across the couch, and his hand gets to my right thigh before I can blink. Tall people sure have it easy. It would have taken me another five seconds to cross that distance.
“Nothing as ordinary as Sexton Nance,” he says. “Tom and Shari sounds nice.”
It does. Kind of just ... rolls off the tongue I want to use on him.
“I’d let you name it, Shari.”
“I’m not very good at naming things.” I slide off the arm of the couch and scoot closer to him. “I named my first dog Methuselah. He was a shar-pei. All wrinkly. I named my first car Hiccup because that’s about all it did.”
“The Methuselah’s Hiccup Ad Agency. Trendy.”
“The word is edgy.”
“The sharpest.”
“But I wouldn’t name it that,” I say, sliding up onto his lap again, this time deciding to straddle him because, I’m, um, cold, and it’s, um, much more comfortable, for, um, him, and it’s easier to talk to him, you know, face-to-face.
Okay, I’m tripping. It feels really good down there. My “happy space” is rejoicing.
“I’d probably name it Breezy,” I say.
“Breezy?” He holds me closer.
I am definitely warming up. Good thing I, um, straddled him, so I could, well, capture all that warmth. “You had no problems with Methuselah’s Hiccup, but you have concerns about Breezy?”
“Not very edgy.” He pulls me even closer to him, and I don’t fight it. I want to smell like oranges and lemons for days.
“It’s family friendly,” I say. “It’s cool. You know, breezy.” I sneak my hands around to his back. Geez, I can barely reach around this guy.
“Not very avant-garde. Sounds like a lot of wind to me.”
I begin to massage his lower back. “Hush. It’s how I feel right now with you. Breezy.” And very juicy. Well, I am. His body feels nice to mine.
“Why not ... Methuselah’s Breezy Hiccup?” he says.
I hunch farther up his lap, locking my feet around his back. I am about as close to this man as the law—and God—allows. “We’d be an ancient, windy burp.” I dig my fingers lower into his back, and he sighs. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”
“No.” He closes
his eyes. “We should, um, separate soon.”
Not while I’m this close to you. “Separate? Why?” I slide my hands under his shirt and rub his back, his skin so smooth and hot.
“The game’s afoot at six a.m. tomorrow.”
I stop rubbing. “You’re getting up at six?”
“I booked the earliest flight I could get,” he says. “I have to get back to the city fast. Otherwise, I won’t be able to kick your booty.”
I dig my nails into his back. Ow. I think I just bent a few nails. “So you’re leaving me ... now?”
“I really should, Shari. I wouldn’t want to wake you in the morning.”
No. He can’t leave. Not now! “I want you to wake me in the morning. You have to stay.”
“I’m afraid we’ll, um ...” He frowns. “I know I might try to ...” He sighs. “I’m worried that if I stay ...”
The man just read my mind exactly. I can’t finish a sentence in my head either.
“We don’t have to do anything but keep each other warm,” I say.
He nods. “I think I can manage to do only that, but what if we get too hot?”
Yeah, what if. “I’ll turn down the thermostat.”
He smiles. “Okay, I’ll stay.”
He puts those big meat hooks under my shirt, rubbing on my lower back. Yeah, buddy. Tear it up. Nice. “But I must leave at four,” he says.
“Why?” I kiss his chin. I kiss just above his chin. I have to strain to kiss his lower lip.
“I turn into a pumpkin.”
“This isn’t Cinderella, Prince Charming.” I nuzzle his neck with my nose. “You’re not leaving me.”
“I don’t ever want to leave you, Shari.”
No one has ever said that to me. I might start crying. I move my hands around to his front and start feeling me a real man’s chest. Geez, I’m jealous. Not too much hair, bigger nipples than mine, definite cuts.