“Don’t do it,” she pleads.
I bring the finger that was just inside her to my lips. Her lusty gaze drops and she watches as I taste her on my fingertip. Shaking my head slowly, I tell her, “Better than any dessert you’ve ever brought me.”
“Heaven help me,” she says so quietly, I barely hear her.
With a devilish grin, I tell her, “Heaven can’t help you tonight, Virginia.”
Before she can come to her senses, I remove my arm from around her shoulders, using that hand to catch the back of her neck instead. I draw her closer, waiting for her to object, but she doesn’t this time. Her eyes close and her lips part, and me? I know an invitation when I see one.
6
Virginia
My heart beats so fast, I can hardly contain it. Any moment I expect it to execute its escape and gallop right out of my body.
I keep my eyes closed out of a sense of self-preservation. I need some level of anonymity to this encounter. I need there to be less to remember. Already my senses are on overload. He’s right on top of me in this booth so I can’t help breathing in the scent of his cologne. I feel his heat, the hardness of his body, his overwhelming power as he uses it to commit an unspeakable crime—to rob me of my better judgment.
In a moment, his lips will meet mine, and when that happens, I need at least one sense to be free of him. Not looking at him may be my only saving grace.
Only, it feels like I’ve been waiting half a lifetime, and his lips don’t touch mine. For a horrified moment, I wonder if he didn’t intend to kiss me at all. I replay the moment in my mind, but no, he was definitely leaning in for a kiss. Why did he stop?
When I open my eyes, he’s watching me. His face is so close to mine. God, I love that face. Without thought, I reach my hand out and touch him. This is bad, so bad. I’m adding moments to this memory, adding fuel to this fire. It’s already impossible to tell him no, and I’ve done the impossible before, but not like this. When he’s spinning out of control and he just needs steadying it’s one thing, but tonight he isn’t in need. Tonight he is just fine, and that makes him wanting to pounce on me much scarier.
I shouldn’t be here. I should be on the fringes of his life, like always, only surfacing when he has a need I can meet for him. Something simple and less scarring, like an empty stomach or a dry throat, on the rarest of occasion, a crackwhore he needs kicked out of his house, but never this. This is not the need I’m supposed to meet for Rafe.
My presence here is cracking open a need in me, and that’s the real problem. That’s the Pandora’s box, and if I let him break the seal, all kinds of trouble is bound to come spilling out.
Well, jar. It was a jar of curses, not a box. That’s always bothered me.
It’s a stupid thing to be bothered about, an even stupider thing to bring up right now, but when my mouth opens, nervous words spill out.
“Did you know that Pandora’s box was actually a jar? In the original poem, Pandora was given a large jar of curses, not a box, but the myth was mistranslated, and the mistranslation is what stuck. I guess opening Pandora’s jar doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?”
Rafe stares at me for a moment, then a slow smile spreads across his face and he starts laughing.
I flush, letting my hand fall from his face. He grabs it immediately and puts it back, his hand lingering on my wrist.
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you,” he assures me, his eyes dancing with affection. “I was laughing at me.”
“Why were you laughing at yourself?” I question, not entirely believing him.
“Well, because it seems I have a type, and I can’t believe I’m past 30 and just now learning that about myself.”
I frown faintly, running through a catalog of female faces. He probably means more recently, so I run through Laurel, Marlena, Jayla, and Cassandra. It’s a smaller sample this time, given his abstinence streak. None of those women have anything in common beyond the painfully obvious. “What type is that?” I ask.
His brown eyes twinkle with amusement. “Nerds.”
I roll my eyes. “Having knowledge doesn’t make me a nerd. I’m cursed with it, actually. Well, not the knowledge, but the—never mind. Are you talking about Laurel?” Marlena certainly wasn’t a nerd. That chick didn’t possess half an ounce of intelligence in the soft-boiled egg that served as her mind.
Nodding his head, he says, “If you start telling me about the sexual deviance of ducks, this is going to get spooky.”
My brow furrows. “The sexual deviance of ducks? What, like they blindfold and flog each other to get off?”
His eyes light up with interest and he settles back in his seat, while running the tips of his fingers along the sensitive inside of my thigh. Tingles spread everywhere and it becomes hard to focus on his words. I follow his voice, his low, steady tone soothing my senses even as his hand excites them. “Floggers, huh? What do you know about those?”
It’s hard to concentrate on what I know about floggers with the untouched synapses in my brain going haywire, alerting me to the proximity of the man of all my fantasies, and the risky location of his fingers. “Um… that you should never use one on the kidney regions. It can be dangerous.”
Nodding easily, he continues to caress my thigh. “That’s right. It’s an incredibly vulnerable part of the body. A good place to strike someone you want to hurt, a good place to stab if you want to go for the kill, but a definitive no-no area for sexual impact play. Have you played with a flogger before?”