She looked at him with a vulnerability he hadn't seen on her face since their younger days, when she was still trying to effect warmer relationships with her parents. "I'm scared."
"Of dating?"
"Yes. Just look at you and Blythe. You're together, but not together."
"Just don't agree to a friends with benefits deal and you're safe."
Else grimaced. "No chance of that. I don't know what carrot my dad is offering, but I'm pretty sure marriage is the only option."
Although Else was on track to ger her MBA and had a brilliant mind, her father had not shifted one bit on his belief that a daughter could not take over his empire from him. He wanted a son-in-law who would provide grandsons. Heaven help both Else and the man she was interested in if they only had daughters.
"I'm going to have him investigated," Tor warned her, not even half-jokingly. "You know that, right?"
She laughed anyway. "He's a stand up guy…I just, he makes me feel stuff."
And for people like them, that was damn scary. Tor knew.
Their press release went out the day after they returned to Boston.
His father actually called to tell Tor he was sorry to hear about the breakup.
Tor kept the call short, hanging up as quickly as he could without being rude.
"You rushed him off the phone." Blythe sat naked in his bed, her beautiful brown eyes filled with censure.
He joined her on the bed, pulling Blythe into his arms. "You are surprised? If you had wanted me to talk longer, you should have put some clothes on and maybe stepped into the other room."
Blythe anywhere near a bed was temptation enough. Naked? He had no hope of ignoring her.
"Don't you blame me. You could have waited a few more minutes to rejoin me." The words were chastising, but she melted against him, responding to his touch as she always did.
"My father wanted to commiserate over a misery I do not feel," Tor said against the soft skin of her nape between nibbling kisses.
Blythe shivered, her entire body moving in an altogether enticing way. "I told you so."
"Told me what?" he asked before moving down to latch onto a nipple already sensitive from their earlier lovemaking.
"What?" she asked, her tone dazed.
He did not bother to answer, but focused on the pleasure he was giving her and ecstasy she returned to him.
Penetration without protection never got old. Every single time he slipped into her body skin to skin, Tor felt the weight of it and the pleasure that could not be topped.
They were snuggling in a sweaty, post coital haze of lingering pleasure when Blythe said. "I told you it would hurt his feelings."
He knew immediately what she was talking about. It was like that between them. They had entire conversations in silence that would erupt into speech that no one else would have understood.
But they did.
He didn't dwell on what that meant, but accepted that the friendship part of friends with benefits was as important as the sex to him.
"His feelings are not hurt. He thought mine were."
"Which hurt him."
"You're looking at my father through rose colored glasses again." He spoke with an indulgence he afforded few people in his life.
Blythe sat up, the view she offered sending a throb of sated pleasure through him. "I know he let you down, but he cares about you, Tor."