by Pippa Grant
“Them? You mean all the women you sleep with that you’ve picked up here?”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“And you take advantage of being called Mr. Romance to parade around nearly naked at public events—”
“That bachelor auction raised over two hundred thousand dollars for literacy, and I went for almost half of that.”
“Romance Librarian Poses Nude for Bachelor Auction,” Marty fires back. “You think the Times won’t dig that up?”
Pretty sure he’s not interested in how many fucks I don’t give, so I go for the silent you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about glare.
“Mr. Sampson’s been a journalist a lot longer than you’ve been a librarian, son. He decides to do some digging, he’s going to print an article about the Playboy of West Park Library, and then I’m going to get fired for not sacking you a long time ago.”
My jaw’s clenched so hard I’m cracking molars. “I don’t date patrons.” On purpose, anyway. Never know who you’re going to meet. Or where. There was that one time I stepped in when a lady’s blind date stood her up at the Laundromat. Long story. Happy ending. For both of us. Until she showed up three days later at toddler story time and followed the crowds to my section afterwards.
She’s happily married to a dude who runs a pizza joint now.
Whereas I’m still getting shit from Dorky over the whole incident.
“You’re on probation for the next month. You’re also going to apologize to Mr. Sampson, and the Chocolate and Romance program is canceled.”
I don’t give a fuck about probation, and I’ll eat shit for breakfast before I apologize to the condescending asshole, but canceling my romance program? Too far, Dorky. Too far. “The hell it is.”
“Marty, well over one hundred patrons have registered,” Gertie interjects. “We have authors and a couple bloggers flying in from all over the country to sit on the panel.”
This is ludicrous. “You want to put me on probation? Fine. But that program is mine. Call the Times back. Invite them. Invite all of them. Especially the asshat. The only redaction getting published is his.”
Marty actually laughs. “You’re going to get Jedidiah Sampson here, for a romance and chocolate program.”
“Damn straight. His boss wants me, she can bring him along. And I’ll get him to admit he’s a dick, and they’ll write up a glowing review of our library and the program, or I’ll hand you my resignation myself.”
“You’ll quit if Jedidiah Sampson doesn’t confess to being a dick.”
“Dream opportunity, Marty. I won’t be your problem anymore.”
He levels a look on me that sends a chill through my body. Fucker’s a librarian. He shouldn’t be scary.
But he can still fire me. I don’t take much seriously in life, but I love my job.
“You go ahead and try,” he says. “No flirting with the ladies, no auctioning your naked butt off again, no more insulting anyone here or on that ridiculous blog of yours, and if you give the Times any reason to report this event is just a glorified dating game for you, you’re done.”
He jabs a finger at me, his vein throbs harder, and he turns and stalks out of the office.
To his credit, he didn’t add no dating any more of my daughters to his list of demands, but that’s a given at this point.
Gertie looks me up and down. Usually she shows her exasperation with a smile.
Today, she grips me by the ear, shoves me into my chair, and grunts like a caveman who’s run out of raw buffalo meat. “If you would’ve just settled down with that sweet girl two years ago, none of this would be an issue.”
I don’t have a clue which sweet girl she’s talking about, but even though I’ve read this book, and probably a hundred more like it, I suddenly realize just how perfect it is to have Parker Parker Elliott in my life right now.
16
Parker
Tuesdays are made for tacos, and this Tuesday, I’m having all the tacos. Chili lime tacos, Baja shrimp tacos, beef and pineapple tacos… I really do mean all the tacos.
As soon as I get out of work. Which isn’t looking like it’ll be anytime soon.
It’s almost seven, and I’m alternately adding notes to a pitch response on some new organic ice cream and making myself a to-do list for tomorrow when I hear a familiar knock at my top-floor office door. “I know,” I say to Sia without looking up, “it’s taco time. Another thirty minutes, and I’ll be ready.” Maybe.
“Wrong,” she says cheerfully.
I start and check out the door, and while I’d like to say my pussy perked up and cheered, that obnoxious organ in my chest swelled harder.
There’s just something about a book-smart jungle man holding a bouquet of pink carnations that my inner girly-girl heart can’t resist.
I straighten and accidentally toss my pen at the potted cactus in the corner that I should’ve had taken out when I moved up here. “Knox. Hey.”
“Parker Parker. So this is where the magic happens.” His smile is about twenty watts too dim, and my heart sinks.
Break-up flowers.
We’re not even honestly dating, and he’s bringing break-up flowers.
“Yep.” I swallow hard. “Magic. All of it, right here.”
“I found him hanging out at the security desk,” Sia says. “Oh, and I can’t make taco Tuesday. Neither can Willow or Eloise. Guess you’ll have to find someone else.” She shoves Knox deeper into my office, ducks out, and slams the door shut.
Pretty sure she would’ve locked it if she could’ve.
While I stand awkwardly, Knox angles to my desk and sits on the edge. “Taco Tuesday?” He wouldn’t look intrigued if those were breakup flowers, would he? And—did he just check out my chest?
He did. His gaze is back on eye level now, but he was definitely checking out my lemons.
I coyly roll my shoulders back like I know what I’m doing. “It’s a thing we do. On Tuesdays.”
Oooh, his eyes are getting darker, and they keep flicking downward. “Not Mondays?”
“That’s Margarita Monday.”
The wattage in his smile is amping up, and he’s angling closer across the desk. “What’s Saturday then?”
“Sopapilla Saturday.”
“Wednesday?”
“On Wednesdays, I’m just sad. Do you know how hard it is to find a Mexican food that starts with a W? But usually my taco hangover consoles me.”
He laughs, and my chacha goes all tingly and perky. He tilts the flowers toward me. “If I’d known how serious you were about your tacos, I would’ve brought you one instead."
“You don’t have to bring me anything.” My fingers brush his, and a streak of elustricity ignites my skin from my fingertips to my hooha. Yes, elustricity. “But thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I come begging for a favor.”
Now that I’ve convinced myself these aren’t break-up flowers, my lady bits are driving my brain bus. And they’d like to volunteer themselves as his first favor. “What’s up?” I ask as I let my gaze take a lazy meander at his crotch.
Am I being too subtle?
Or too obvious?
Doesn’t matter, I decide, because when I lock eyes with Knox again, his have heated to a gazillion degrees and now the air in my entire office is crackling with elustricity.
“Parker Parker Elliott,” he says soft and deep, “are you coming on to me?”
I lean forward and stroke the corded outline of his forearm. I’ve been thinking about licking that tattoo on his bicep since Sunday. “If I were, would it be working?”
He answers me by hooking a hand around my neck and pulling me in for a hard, hot tongue-wrestling match over my desk. He rumbles his approval when I slide my tongue against his and open wider. I dimly register the sound of papers scattering through the air. Something thumps to the ground—my stapler?—and then Knox is on my side of the desk, and I’m standing between his legs, raking my hands
down his chest and tugging his shirt out of his jeans and oh yes, his skin is so hot and silky over the hard ridges of his muscles and bones and he’s grabbing my ass and yanking me against him so I can feel that thick, hard bulge in his pants that I want to grab and stroke and—
“Security,” I gasp.
His eyes go wide and he lifts his hands. “Whoa, sorry, I thought—”
“No. I mean, not no to you. Yes to you. Security cameras. We’re not alone.”
I point to the corner where the camera is aimed at my door and window.
We lock gazes again, and then both look at the corner under the camera.
That friggin’ cactus is sitting in the only spot in my office that isn’t visible to the camera. It’s a giant-ass prickly pear with like fourteen paddles and a bajillion prickles in a two-foot-wide pot, and I keep wondering if it’s ever going to die or if the night cleaning crew is watering it. I don’t know shit about cactuses, but I know that one’s a dick. A cock-blocking cactus dick.
“Parker Parker Elliott, you still have work to do,” Knox says softly.
My to-do list is somewhere on the floor. My phone is off the hook, the unit itself hanging over the edge by a cord, and my tray organizer is crookedly dangling precariously on the corner. The flowers are somewhere on the other side of my desk.
And I don’t want to pick it up, or do work, or do anything except find a broom closet without a fucking security camera in it.
“Sit,” Knox says.
“I don’t want to—”
“Sit.”
There’s a mischievous gleam in his eyes, coupled with something dark and sexy and enticing. I don’t know why he wants me to sit so badly, but just this once, I follow orders.
He straightens my phone and tray organizer, then bends—oh, god, that ass—and scoops up my to-do list.
“Oh, Ms. Elliott,” he says, “looks like there’s something under your desk.”
I push back and peer under my desk. “There is?”
He scooches my chair back another smidge and bends over too. “Yep.”
“I don’t—” I start, but then he’s crawling under my desk.
Crawling. Under. My. Desk.
“Yep.” He hooks his hands under my knees and pulls me back to the desk. “Looks like I’m under your desk. I think this warrants further exploration.”
And before I can think, or move, or form any semblance of a coherent reason why this is a bad idea, he gently parts my knees and slides his palms up my bare thighs.
“Do those cameras have sound?”
“N—no,” I whisper.
“I love this skirt.”
And I suddenly love the blowhard who insisted on this massive carved mahogany desk that’s the size of a small Caribbean island.
Knox’s fingers brush the edges of my panties. “Scoot closer, kitten.”
Ohmygod.
I quickly jiggle my hips until I’m perched on the edge of my seat.
“Spread wider, baby.”
My legs fall open until my knees hit the walls of the desk. He presses a kiss to my inner thigh, my chacha shivers in delicious delight, and I struggle to keep a straight face for the cameras. If I get caught—
Ohmygod, he’s licking my other thigh while he strokes me over my panties, and my pussy is quivering and pulsing and drenched in anticipation. I whimper and clench my hands into fists on my desk.
“Good?” Knox asks.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Tell me more. And grab a pen and pretend like you’re working.”
The closest I’ve ever gotten to talking dirty to anyone—phone sex with Knox aside—was that time my date asked me to call his dick Mr. Carrot.
But I can do this. “I like the way you’re touching me.”
“Where?”
I swallow hard. “On my pussy.”
“I like touching your pussy.” He slips a finger under the edge of my thong, and the feel of flesh-on-flesh makes me jerk in my seat.
“More?” he asks.
“Oh, god, yes.” I share one wall with the new chief financial officer and the other with the head of HR, both of whom are probably working as late as I am.
I could get fired for this.
Knox licks the lace of my panties, right over my clit, and I almost explode on the spot. “Ohmygod.”
“You are so fucking sexy.”
I’m so fucking turned on. My pussy is aching and hungry and painfully desperate for more—for his touch, for him to fill me, for everything—and my breasts ache and I’m struggling to keep from panting. The security cameras can’t see Knox, but they can see me.
He slides my panties to the side, stroking and teasing me. His hair tickles my inner thighs, and when he presses a kiss to my very core, I clench my teeth together to keep from crying out.
Or possibly to keep from crying at all, because there’s a man kneeling under my desk to go down on me in my office, licking and stroking and heating me into a frenzy as though my pleasure, my power, my satisfaction is the only thing in the world that matters. I tilt my hips into his mouth, into the glide of his tongue. I’m clutching the edges of my keyboard.
“More,” I whimper.
He sucks my clit and slips a finger into my pussy, and everything shatters hard and fast and deep in a blinding stroke of lightning that detonates in my core and bursts out in an intense explosion of pleasure hovering on the point of pain. My inner walls clench tight around his finger, the spasms crashing one after another on top of each other, a roaring in my ears drowning out everything but white light and pure ecstasy and this otherworldly sensation that I’m floating.
I’m still clenching my jaw shut, still hanging on to the keyboard for dear life, vaguely aware that the mewling noises I’m making are probably drifting through the walls as I come down off my first man-made orgasm, my breath coming in hard, short pants, my heart racing.
“Ohmygod,” I whisper when I can talk again.
Knox is smoothing my skirt back down. “You’re fucking beautiful, Parker. And we’re getting my next taco to go.”
I clamp a hand to my mouth to stop the giggle, but it won’t be suppressed.
“Oh, look. I found a paperclip.” He crawls out from under my desk with a paperclip in hand, and I swear he must’ve had that thing in his pockets because I’ve never seen that blue paperclip before in my life.
But I take it, make a serious show of thanking him for the paperclip, and test my knees to see if they’ll hold me if I stand.
My jungle hottie just ate me out in my office.
I may never be able to sit at this desk without thinking of him again.
And I can’t see how that could ever be a bad thing.
17
Knox
I’m still feeling like a fucking rock star for that performance under Parker’s desk when we get to her apartment with take-out tacos from a Mexican place around the corner. Not organic, which I can’t help but rib her about since she works for Crunchy. Still a good cause, she reminds me, since it’s a second-generation mom-and-pop store with a clientele who won’t pay organic prices.
I like that about her—she’s conscientious without being pretentious. The world’s not black and white.
She pauses outside her apartment and gives me a funny look.
“I don’t care if it’s messy,” I tell her.
The funny look doesn’t go away. And now I really want to know what’s behind that door. “Are you a secret hoarder?”
“No.”
“Have an ex’s body chopped up and buried under the floorboards?”
“No. God, why would you go there?”
“Sorry. Listening to a romantic suspense earlier. Cynthia Eden. She’s amazing. Ah, let’s see…you have eighty-five cats and three parrots who sing dirty songs?”
She laughs. “It’s just me.”
“A-ha!” I snap his fingers. “You don’t want me to see your shrine to Tarzan.”
Her blush explodes so hard and fas
t I can feel the heat coming off her face.
“No,” she says quickly.
Too quickly.
I angle my body to align my hips to her belly, because the idea of Parker having a shrine to Tarzan is oddly erotic.
“Parker Parker Elliott, you do.”
“No. I told you the other night. I have a thing for the jungle.”
“You have some vines we can swing on?”
“No.”
“A jungle tree pole?”
“No.”
“Some jungle toys?”
She pokes my chest. “Quit making fun.”
“I live with my Nana. I can’t make fun.”
She shakes her head, turns the lock, and lets me in. “Not. One. Word.”
There aren’t vines hanging from the ceiling, and she doesn’t have a replica of the Nile running between her living room and kitchenette, but there’s a definite jungle safari theme. Zebra and leopard print patterns on rugs and throws. Abstract paintings of elephants and giraffes on the walls. Lush house plants add to the jungle feel, but not so many that she’s a crazy plant lady. And her end tables on either side of the couch under her window—wow.
The bases are carved baby elephants. “Not even to ask where you got those?”
She eyes me. I slide my hands down her waist to those curvy hips.
“I like it.” I press a kiss to the corner of her mouth, take the taco bag from her and set it on the two-person table at the edge of the kitchenette, and pull her body closer to mine.
“You’re trying not to make a Tarzan joke right now, aren’t you?”
“Who, me?”
Before she can answer, I suck her lower lip into my mouth. She loops an arm around my neck and kisses me back, slow and languid, as though we have all night. My balls are heavy and aching, my cock leaping to attention, and if I don’t touch her again, now, something vital deep inside me is going to break.
I love this skirt she’s wearing today—loose and flowy and so easy to hitch up to her waist so I can stroke her bare ass cheeks. God bless the man who invented the thong.
She’s pawing at my shirt, tugging it out of my jeans and running her hands up my abs to my chest, and I’m thinking about going caveman and tossing her over my shoulder to carry her to the bedroom when she suddenly freezes, then yanks her skirt down and skitters out of my reach.