“It’s not the kind of bra you’re supposed to wear on hikes, but I had to draw the line somewhere,” she said.
“My God, you’re amazing,” he said. He reached for her again, and let his thumbs dance over her dark nipples.
“Do you like that?” he asked.
Her eyes closed halfway, and she nodded.
“I like it a lot,” she said.
He kept touching her, sometimes gently, sometimes roughly, to see how she responded, what made her bite her lip, or moan, or toss her head back. After he felt like he’d driven them both to the breaking point, he sat up and pulled her pants off.
“You have matching panties?” he almost shouted.
She laughed out loud.
“Look, I wasn’t sure it was going to happen today, but a girl can hope, can’t she?”
He reached for her hands and pulled her upright.
“That’s it. The couch is all well and good for some things, but right now, I need you in my bed.”
She tossed her head—and her ass—as she walked ahead of him toward the stairs.
“And what do you propose to do while we’re in there, hmm?”
He walked behind her up the stairs and blessed his good fortune.
“Well,” he said as he joined her at the top of the stairs. “First, I’m going to rip those panties right off of you. Then I’m going to make you come so hard you’re gasping for air. And then I’m going to fuck you until neither of us can remember our names. Does that sound good to you?”
She reached for his fly and unzipped his pants.
“Mmm, that sounds excellent, but can I suggest a slight change in the agenda?”
She didn’t wait for his answer before she pulled his pants down.
“The thing is,” she said as she pushed his underwear to join his pants on the floor, “I’ve been waiting to see this for quite some time.” She wrapped her hand around his hard cock. “And, as I anticipated, it doesn’t disappoint. So, if you could just . . . give me a moment here.”
She pushed him against the wall, right outside his bedroom door, and sank to her knees. Then she looked up at him and smiled.
“Is that all right with you?”
He’d lost all ability to speak. The sight of her there, in that hot-as-hell lingerie, her lips less than an inch from his cock . . . he was surprised he was still standing.
But she was clearly waiting for some sort of signal from him, so finally he nodded. Seconds later, her tongue darted out of her mouth and licked the tip of his cock. He closed his eyes but immediately opened them again. He had to keep watching her.
First she licked him from the tip to the base, then she wrapped her hand around his cock and sucked him into her mouth.
Holy shit, she was so fucking good at this. He wanted to tell her that, he wanted to say something, but all he could do was stare at her and enjoy the hell out of this.
It felt so good—her lips around him, the friction of her hand and of her tongue, her other hand gripping his ass—he knew he wasn’t going to last long. He closed his eyes to try to hold himself together, but then he felt the scrape of her teeth against him, and he knew he was done.
He collapsed on the floor next to her after he came, and when he could open his eyes again, she was smiling down at him.
“We haven’t even made it to the bedroom yet,” he said.
She smiled again and reached for his hand to pull him up.
“I think it’s time, don’t you?”
* * *
* * *
Olivia couldn’t help herself from a little swagger as she pulled Max into his bedroom, both of them giggling like teenagers. He had clearly enjoyed the hell out of that blow job, but the weird thing was, she’d enjoyed giving it to him almost as much as he’d enjoyed getting it. She usually could take or leave giving blow jobs—men were often gross and smelly, they always tried to push your head in one direction or another, which just made you feel like a blow-up doll, and they were rarely appropriately appreciative, and instead just seemed to think of blow jobs as their due.
But it had been different with Max. It was only because of the way he’d looked at her on the couch and again on the way up the stairs that she’d done it at all. She couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at her like that—with awe and excitement, like he’d unwrapped a present he’d wanted for years. When they got to the top of the stairs and he was still looking at her like that, she had to pull his pants off; she couldn’t help herself.
They tumbled together into his bed and turned to look at each other, both with big grins on their faces. It felt strange and impossible and completely right that she was here with him.
He pulled her against his chest, and they lay there for a while together. It had been a long time since she was this happy, this comfortable, lying like this in a man’s arms. She hadn’t realized how much she missed this feeling.
Or maybe she felt that way now because she was with Max. Maybe she just missed every moment she hadn’t spent with him.
She trailed her hand over his springy dark chest hair and then back down. He laughed and flipped her over before she could get where she was going.
“I’m going to need a little more recovery time than that, you know. I’m thirty-nine, after all.”
She smiled up at him.
“I think I remember you saying something a few minutes ago about what we were going to do in here—Senator Powell, do you fulfill your campaign promises?”
He hooked his thumbs around her panties, and with one quick tug, they were off her body and thrown across the room.
“Absolutely I do,” he said. Then he slid down her body and proceeded to make her come so hard she was gasping for air.
When she had—sort of—recovered, she reached down for that excellent dick again.
“Ahhh, here we are,” she said as her hand closed around it.
“Here we are indeed.” He kissed her greedily, like he couldn’t get enough of her. Dear God, she felt like she was being tricked, like she was in a dream. Not just how good they were together in bed—that was a delight, of course. But the way he looked at her, the way he touched her, the way he treated her, was like nothing she’d ever experienced. Like he felt lucky to be with her. She could get addicted to this.
“Hold on one second.” He let go of her and rolled over to the other side of his bed. He opened a drawer of his nightstand and then fumbled with a box. She sat up with a grin.
“New box?” she asked.
He looked sideways at her and shrugged.
“I bought it after our first date. My old ones had all expired, and I was . . . well, I was hopeful.”
She dropped back down onto the bed while he pulled a condom out of the box. After that night, she thought he hadn’t been interested in her at all, and meanwhile he was out there buying condoms with her in mind. This was one of the few times she was very happy to have been wrong.
It took him only a few seconds to get the condom out of the box and on.
“I like the way you watch me do that,” he said.
She ran her hands up and down his chest, his back, and let them come to rest on his butt.
“I liked the way you watched me, too,” she said.
Suddenly, there was no time for talking, just kissing, and touching, and stroking, and sucking. At long last, he slid between her legs, then paused and looked down at her.
“Please,” she asked.
He pushed inside her, and she gasped.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked.
To the contrary.
“No, no, it just felt so good.”
He grinned.
“Thank God.”
And then he did the same thing again, but harder, and again, and again. Her gasps and his moans were the only sounds in the room. It felt so good, she wa
nted this to go on forever; it felt too good, so good she almost couldn’t handle it. Then he reached his hand down between them to touch her in exactly the place he knew she wanted to be touched, and she pressed her mouth into his shoulder so she wouldn’t scream. He went faster and faster, and then collapsed on top of her.
“Holy shit,” he said as he rolled to the side and pulled her against him.
“Mmmhmm,” was all she could respond. After a few seconds, she looked up at him.
“If all hikes end like that, I wish I’d gotten into hiking years ago,” she said.
He laughed and then gave her a look that made her dizzy.
“You make me so happy, Olivia Monroe,” he said, right before he kissed her again.
Chapter Ten
Max poked his head into Kara’s office when he got in on Monday morning.
“Hey, do you have a minute to chat? I want to talk to you about something.”
Kara followed him into his office.
“Anything wrong, sir?”
He flicked the lights on and sat down behind his desk, coffee in hand. After . . . everything that had happened between him and Olivia after the hike, he ended up never sending that text to Kara, so he’d decided to wait to talk to her in person.
“No, no, nothing’s wrong, the opposite. I had an idea over the weekend. Well, actually, it wasn’t my idea—I was talking to a friend about the criminal justice reform bill and it was their idea.”
Not for the first time, he wanted to tell Kara about Olivia. Partly so he’d be able to actually give her credit for this idea, but also because Olivia was becoming a bigger and bigger part of his life, and it felt absurd that Kara didn’t know about her. Kara had been by his side for three years now—he either saw or talked to her almost every day, and the days they didn’t talk, they texted or emailed. She knew everything about him, almost. Except for this.
But no, he couldn’t tell her yet. It would be completely inappropriate for him to tell someone who worked for him about his new relationship. Besides, it wasn’t like this was the kind of thing they talked about; all he knew about her personal life was that she’d once brought her girlfriend to the office holiday party. He hoped he’d get to tell Kara about Olivia eventually, but that would be when he and Olivia were ready to go public, and they weren’t there yet. No matter how great things had been over the weekend (and they’d been really, phenomenally great)—that wasn’t in the plan for the immediate future.
“What was the idea, sir?” Kara asked.
Right, the idea.
“So I know you’ve been gently telling me for a while that the bill might not go anywhere. Well, my friend reminded me of something you and others here have also been trying to tell me: I can keep fighting for the bill, but I can do other things to help the cause of criminal justice reform. What if we had town halls in marginalized communities all around California—to find out what people most care about, to figure out other ways to help them, and so they know we’re listening to them and working for them, instead of just trying to fight a possibly losing battle? We might even try to get state legislators involved, see if we can change some California law in the process.”
Kara nodded slowly.
“Hmm. I like this idea, sir.” She flipped open her notebook and scrawled a few lines. “It’ll take a lot of work—from both the DC and local staffs, but I think everyone will be excited about it.”
Max rubbed his hands together. He couldn’t wait to tell Olivia this.
“Fantastic,” he said. “Maybe the first one could be in a few weeks? I could do one every Friday afternoon for the next few months!”
Kara laughed out loud.
“Excuse me, sir. I’m sorry, but no. A few weeks? This will take a great deal of planning and coordination; it’ll take closer to a few months for us to do this right.”
Sometimes he was happy that he had a staff who would tell it to him like it was and not jump to satisfy his every whim, even if those whims were ridiculous. But when they laughed at him like this . . . okay, fine, he was still happy about it, just less happy.
“Right, I didn’t think about that,” he said.
Kara flipped through her calendar.
“Plus, your schedule is pretty packed for the next few months, what with it being an election year and all. You have at least one fundraiser almost every week until I don’t know when.”
This was the problem with having someone on your staff whose literal job it was to schedule your time—he had no idea what was on his calendar from week to week.
“Nobody in Congress wants to vote for my bill, but they still want me at their fundraisers, huh?” he asked.
Kara looked up at him, a wry smile on her face.
“You know how this town works—you get a lot of headlines and buzz, so whether or not they want to vote for your bill, they still want you to make speeches to get people to throw dollars toward their campaigns.”
Kara made another note, then looked up at him.
“However, we could make this into a plan for the August recess. There will be lots of places that will be thrilled to have you, and some members of Congress, or Democratic challengers, who will be very happy to be on board.”
Kara stood up, notebook in one hand and calendar in the other.
“Let me call Andy, and then he can talk to the district offices and we’ll see if we can come up with a timetable.” She paused at his office door. “Good idea, sir. Please thank your friend for me.”
Max pulled out his phone to text Olivia as soon as Kara had closed the door behind her.
Chief of staff loves the town halls idea—told me to thank you for her. So thank you, from both me and her. Wish I could thank you in person right now, though.
Not for the first time, he wished Washington, DC, and L.A. were closer together. If only he could see Olivia again tonight.
* * *
* * *
“What have I gotten myself into?”
All week, as Olivia had done client work, written pitches for clients the firm hoped to get, and gone to lunches and coffees with law school friends and former colleagues to try to drum up business, that phrase had been drumming through her head. But not about the firm—about Max. How had she committed herself to him? And how did she miss him this goddamn much? Their weekend together had been so perfect, and she hated that because of the time difference and his job, all they had time for this week was occasional texts and a few quick phone calls.
And then she was furious at herself for missing him that much. And liking him that much. She’d caught herself daydreaming about his eyelashes in the middle of the workday, like some lovesick teenager. His eyelashes! He kept saying—and acting as if—he liked her that much, too, but this all just seemed far too good to be true.
The worst part was, she knew she desperately wanted it to be true. She wanted Max to be the caring, thoughtful, interesting man he seemed to be. She wanted the opportunity to get to know that man better. She wanted his desire for her, his interest in her, to be real. But she was still afraid she couldn’t trust any of it.
“Ready for bowling?” Max asked as Olivia opened her front door on Friday night.
She stepped outside.
“As ready as I’ll ever be. I haven’t gone bowling in years. We’ll see how this goes.”
He gestured down the street.
“I’m parked a few houses down—I don’t want anyone to recognize my car in your driveway. I’m sorry, I should have thought of that before.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” She was glad he’d thought about it now. “Thanks.”
They got in the car and he reached for her, then pulled back.
“I’m sorry, I forgot. I can’t kiss you here; I should have come inside for a few minutes. And I’ve been wanting to kiss you so much all week.”
She put her hand
on his knee.
“We’ll have plenty of time after bowling. Or”—she raised an eyebrow at him—“we could go back inside.”
He grinned at her, and put his hand over hers.
“If we do that, we’re never leaving. And you know, I like bowling, but . . .”
She squeezed his hand.
“Look how impatient you are. Don’t get me wrong, I like it, but we can wait.”
Plus, she had her own reasons for wanting to go bowling tonight.
He drove them out to a place he’d found online that was supposed to have pub food that was actually good and beer in a bar attached to the bowling alley, and where you could reserve lanes in advance.
“Thank you for finding this place—I’m glad we’re not going to have to wait forever for a lane,” she said.
He laughed.
“I’m glad I found this place, too, or else I wouldn’t have suggested bowling at all. I loathe having to wait for things. I know maybe that makes me a privileged jerk; sometimes I make myself wait in line for brunch, just to prove I still can, but I hate every second of it.”
Olivia laughed.
“I hate it, too. That first weekend after I got here, I went to one of those places for brunch that I see all over Instagram, and I had to wait for an hour and a half! The food was good, but I’m not sure if there’s any food worth waiting an hour and a half for on a Sunday morning.”
“Thank God you feel that way,” he said.
He put on his fake glasses before they got out of the car. She still hadn’t seen him in that blond wig, but the glasses, plus his tousled hair and plain T-shirt, really did make him look different from the Senator Powell she saw on TV.
Their lane was flanked by teenagers’ birthday parties. The teens had obviously been there for a while and were already rowdy, which was perfect. Teens wouldn’t pay attention to the two of them, bless them.
Max picked up a bowling ball with three fingers, while Olivia tried out one ball, then another.
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