Because, well, I was having decidedly not-friendlike thoughts about Cyrus. It was pretty much constantly too.
It was almost innocent at first.
When he smiled, I focused too much on how his face lit up, how his eyes danced. When he laughed, the sound seemed to move through me, seemed to root somewhere inside.
Then, well, it became not so innocent.
Like when he would touch my arm, and it sent off these electric sparks. Or, once, when he was doing this creepy Hannibal Lecter thing and brushed by hair, and a shiver moved through my insides. And, more and more often, when he pulled out the pet names - which he did often - that did this fluttery thing to my stomach.
Then, well, the natural progression was that he was invading my dreams. And that some of the heroes in the books I was reading - ones that had gotten suspiciously more smutty since he came into the picture - his face would pop up on the hero's face.
And maybe - just maybe - at night, when the sexual frustration was so oppressive that it was actually a heaviness on my lower stomach, well, it was him I thought about when I reached into my nightstand for some relief.
I had read enough YA and romance novels to recognize it when it happened.
A crush.
I had a mega, ultra, can't-go-five-minutes-without-thinking-about-him, crush on Cyrus.
I wanted to believe it was simply because he was the only non-family, non-elderly, non-friend-of-one-of-my-brothers men I had been around in, well, almost years. But the longer I was with him, the more I got to know him, the less I felt that way.
It was a genuine crush, not a by-default kind of thing.
Because Cyrus wasn't a typical alpha a-hole biker.
Cyrus actually had some surprising layers.
And he was a genuinely, all-around good guy.
It was hard not to have a little - or epic - thing for that kind of man.
Even if his boots were getting mud on the front of the circulation desk yet again.
"I don't want to dumb down these poor women!" I objected to his comment about giving them what they wanted.
"Eh, so they read one crappy book where her pussy is referred to as 'down there' like some teenager."
"Shh!" I whisper yelled at him, looking frantically around even though it was a Friday night, and literally no one was ever in the library. And he responded in true Cyrus fashion, giving me one of those big, amused smiles of his. Almost as if, I don't know, he found something I said cute? But maybe that was just me projecting my thoughts onto him. "How do you even know that?" I added, knowing I darn sure hadn't used a term such as 'down there' in front of him before, no matter how much he threw around the p-word.
"Maze was telling Bethany about it. Apparently, she read it. And you did too," he added, smirk going downright devilish. "You dirty little smut-reader, you."
Oh, he had no idea.
I had delved deep into smut. I had my daddy doms, my sadists, my May/December, MM, my MFM, my toys, my sex clubs. There wasn't a single more mainstream kink that you could mention that I hadn't read, or at least had saved on my TBR.
"So, what is she reading today, I wonder," he asked, reaching behind him on the desk for the pile I put there.
I thought nothing of it really, thinking I had packed some Charlotte Bronte, having felt a bit in an angsty, melancholy mood that morning, deciding I needed me some star-crossed Heathcliff and Catherine.
So I was looking down at the order form I had on my clipboard, paying him very little attention for a short moment.
That was until he opened his mouth to speak again.
Except he wasn't speaking; he was reading.
A book that was decidedly not Wuthering Heights.
Oh.
Good.
God.
No.
No freaking way did I pack that one.
That one was one of my forbidden ones. You know, the ones that don't ever leave my apartment because they were just that raunchy that I didn't want to be caught reading them. I mean, there was a naked man on the cover. And, no, I don't mean some wind-gusted-my-white-tunic-open-Fabio cover. I mean the bottom of the cover cut off so low that you could see hair and his adonis muscles were practically pointing toward, well, you know.
How could I have possibly put that book out on my desk? Where my coworkers might see! And probably had. Oh, holy, well, shit. This was definitely a time where 'shit' was a warranted word.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
"'With my ass fully plugged, Denver bent me over the desk in my office, admiring his handiwork, the bright red handprints that had to have been marring the pale white skin of my cheeks. I tried to turn my head to look at him, to see his black eyes, the way his jaw got tight when he was imagining fucking me, like I had seen so many times before. But his hand slammed down on the back of my neck, holding me in place. A long, tense moment passed of him just staring at me before, suddenly, his finger flicked the hot pink plug buried deep in my ass, sending an unexpected surge of desire through my system, making my pussy even wetter than it already was, something I didn't even think was possible.