“What? I can’t help the facts.”
Pike waved to Gibson when he gave them a honk from his vehicle, and Oakley watched his taillights disappear through the cloud of dust his back tires kicked up. “Have you shared women with Gibson like you did with Foster?”
Pike sent her a sidelong glance. “You making a request, Ms. Easton?”
A choked sound burst out of her. “What? No!”
Well …
No.
She shook those images from her head. “I’m just curious.”
His mouth curled at the corner. “Good, because I’m not sharing you.”
“But I thought you did that all the time.”
He leaned forward and kissed her nose. “If that’s really something you feel like you want to explore at some point, we can talk about it. But I have to admit, you bring out my selfish side, mama. I don’t mind if others want to watch, but I want to be the one to touch.”
Something pinged through her at that declaration and the you’re mine in his tone. As curious as she may be about the whole threesome thing and as good-looking as Gibson was, something about Pike staking his claim settled something inside her, made her feel safe.
“And no, I haven’t shared a woman with Gib. I’ve watched him scene a time or two, but he keeps most of his play here private.”
“Is he a dom?”
“He’s a lot of things.”
The vague answer let her know that Pike wasn’t going to share Gibson’s secrets. In a way, that was comforting. Maybe her secrets were safe, too. “It’s not weird knowing that much about your friends’ sex lives?”
Pike handed her clothes to her, and she started to get dressed.
“At first it can be, but after you hang out around here for a while, it just becomes another facet of your friends. You know so-and-so likes to get tied up and whipped in front of a crowd. And that another friend likes to give his wife a male submissive to play with every now and then while he watches. Now Gibson knows we like to fool around outdoors. It just becomes another thing about them. The taboo aspect fades and it brings you closer.”
“I can’t imagine.” She’d been raised in such a close-lipped environment when it came to sexuality that what he was describing was hard to wrap her head around. No one talked about sex aloud when she was growing up. No one. Her brother had once made a joke about “choking the chicken” and he’d been grounded for a month. So imagining such casual openness with friends blew her mind a little.
Pike helped her button her blouse. “The most honest version of ourselves is the one behind closed doors. I’m sure you see that with the calls you take. You probably know more about your callers’ true selves than ninety-nine percent of the people in their lives. Sex and how we feel about it, what we crave? That’s about as vulnerable as a person can get. So with my friends, instead of hiding it, we let one another see behind our closed doors. It’s a privilege we don’t take lightly.”
“Sounds wonderful and completely terrifying.”
He laughed and leaned over to kiss her lightly. “Yes. To both. But I think you’re going to do just fine here.”
“Oh?” she said, meeting his eyes and getting lost in them for a moment. “Why is that?”
“Because your time for hiding behind those doors is done, mama. What we just did out here proves that. You’re fearless.” He pushed her hair away from her face. “Tonight you’re not the staid professional or the good daughter or the responsible mom or Sasha the sex-line operator. Tonight it’s just you and me, whatever that looks like, whatever we want. Tonight all you have to be is mine.”
She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to his, letting the words sink in. This was their night. Her break from it all. Tomorrow her life would go back to normal. She didn’t mind that. She liked her life. But she wasn’t going to let anything hold her back from enjoying her time with Pike tonight.
She wasn’t going to stress about her inexperience or the fact that this was not very mom-like. And though she’d sort of agreed to another time with Pike already, she knew she couldn’t honor that. This one night had to be it and she was going to grab the most she could from it. If you knew you only got to go to the moon once, you wouldn’t waste your time worrying about how you looked in your space suit or what other people thought of you for climbing on the rocket ship. You would keep your eyes wide open and drink it all in.
And she was definitely going to imbibe in every last bit of the beautiful man in front of her.
She looped her arms around Pike’s neck and lifted her head to meet his eyes. “Let’s get going.”
But as soon as they climbed back into the truck and headed toward The Ranch, Oakley’s phone rang.
When she saw the name pop up on the phone, she answered immediately. “Devon? What’s wrong?”
“Don’t freak out.”