“Fine. I’ll at least let him apologize in person.” She plucked the key from his fingers, pivoted direction, and headed toward the elevators, ready to give opportunity, adventure, and a night of steamy sex with a hot cop a shot.
…
Hot beads of water pounded down on Ford’s shoulders, taking away the tension that had been building there since the disastrous kiss with Gina. Gina. He liked the sound of her name. It rolled off his tongue like a mix between a groan and a wish—especially while his eyes were closed and his hand was wrapped around his cock, giving it a slow, tight stroke.
He hadn’t been lying downstairs. She may not be what anyone would call a beauty queen, but there was something about her, something tempting and challenging, that had caught his attention and made him wonder about…everything. Just how soft was her skin at the dip in her waist? Was her laugh low and dirty or a warm soprano? Would she moan when he unzipped that green dress that had clung to her every curve? What would make her call out his name?
What could he say, he was a cop down to his core.
Finding the answers to all of life’s questions turned him on—especially if they were about Gina. She made him so fucking curious. He slid his palm up and down his length, his other hand planted, fingers spread wide against the hard wall tile, and let the fantasy take him. One stroke. Two. Then the unmistakeable sound of his hotel room door opening caught him halfway down the shaft. His eyes snapped open as reality slammed into him.
Shit.
Kapowski.
The stakeout report.
Grateful that he’d mostly shut the bathroom door, so at least the patrolman snagged for the special detail wouldn’t get an eyeful of Ford jerking off, he turned in the shower right in time to see a flash of a green dress and wavy brown hair pass by the door. Then it was gone. Kapowski was blond and stuck to all black. So who in the hell… His fast-thickening dick figured it out quicker than his brain. Gina the wedding planner was in his room.
What was happening?
How did she get in?
Why was she here?
That’s when he heard a voice shouting in his head, Who fuckin’ cares? She’s here and she wouldn’t be if she didn’t want you.
Maybe refusing his drink offer had been because she was still on the clock and not because of him?
Stop asking yourself questions while your hand’s around your cock and talk to the woman in your hotel room, the voice yelled.
“I’m in the shower,” he called out, which was fucking brilliant repartee in its obviousness.
The lights in the bedroom clicked off right as she said, “I picked up on that.”
Figuring that if he thunked his head against the tile it would be loud enough for her to hear in the other room, he clamped his eyes closed and counted to ten instead. Then, he turned the shower knob all the way to the left, letting it linger at the apex of cold for a minute to try to clear his head and deflate his hard-on so he wouldn’t walk out like a fucking loser who’d been jerking off in the hotel bathroom by himself.
Which he was.
But she didn’t need to know that.
By the time he turned the water all the way off, music was playing in the other room. It wasn’t gonna-bang-you-against-the-wall or make-love-to-you-all-night long stuff, it sounded like what his sister Fallon listened to when she did yoga. Oh God. Thinking about his sister right now was not what he wanted to do. His dick shriveled up. Fuck. Going out there as Danny Dinky Dick was not what he wanted, either. Could he catch a fucking break?
Beyond the fact that a chick you were just thinking about while your hand was around your cock is in your hotel room, chucklehead?
He snatched the towel off the stack on the shelf and dried off. “I’ll be right out.”
“Take your time,” she said, her words coming out in a breathy rush.
That made him pause. Something was off about this. However, the blood rushing back south as soon as he heard her voice was louder than that quiet thought. Still, he was a man who always followed the letter and spirit of the law. Consent wasn’t something he took lightly.
“Is everything okay?” he asked. “You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to.”
There was a short silence that lasted four hundred and eighty-two years while he stared into the dark beyond the partially closed bathroom door and felt like an idiot.