“Leave me alone!”
“Would you say I’m the most alpha?”
Nicole covered her face again. “Please don’t be mean to me. I’m really vulnerable right now, in your mysterious house with all your nice things.”
He said nothing and when she resurfaced, he wasn’t smiling. Instead his gaze was hot, something like determination. Only determination didn’t usually make her feel like her clothes were too tight. “What?”
Noah tinged her wine glass. “Let’s talk about what’s gonna happen once you finish this.”
“What do you want to happen?”
He leaned forward, a scrap of setting sun highlighting the hard planes of his face. “I want to take you to bed.”
Nicole looked at her glass, wishing he could be cruder. If he was a pig, it would be easier to pretend her desire was something he was making her feel.
“That not something you want?”
“No, I mean yes.” She swallowed; her throat as tight as a lock. “I want that—to be with you that way. But I’m so bad at all of this. I’m sure I’m going to ruin it. Or we won’t work together, and I’ll have taken this big risk for nothing.”
“Nikki…”
She looked down at the table. “Please don’t tell me I’m overreacting.”
“Never.” There was a hard ring in his voice. “Look at me.”
Reluctantly she glanced up at his eyes.
“You’re not overreacting,” he said. “Come here.”
“Where?”
He patted his thighs. Nicole hesitated, then stood and moved toward him. Noah grabbed her thighs and lifted, arranging her so she was sitting across his legs. He was warm beneath his clothes, his thighs and chest rock hard. He curled an arm around her back and Nicole leaned in, breathing his smoke and cedar scent.
Noah’s hand smoothed across her back. “What do you like, Nikki?”
“In bed?”
“Yeah.”
He must have meant limits and safe words and stuff. All the grown-up, one-night-stand talk she’d swerved by never having sex outside relationships. “I want to use condoms.”
“I…sure.” He leaned back to look at her, his brow furrowed. “Anything else?”
Nicole racked her brain for bases she might have missed. “You can be, you know, rough or whatever, but please don’t hurt me, like pull my hair super hard or give me bruises. And please don’t go near my butt. I’ve never done that and…not the first time.”
Her words were meshing together like melted wax, but that was from nerves, not wine. In fact, the wine was probably the only thing that could ever inspire her to say such a thing out loud. That and Noah’s hand stroking her back in firm hard circles.
“Swearing?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“I know you don’t like it at work, what about bed?”
“I…what do you want to say?”
“Fucking, cunt, pussy, cock,” he said as though reeling off a list of colours. “Whatever I want. They a problem?”
How did she feel about it? In the warm afternoon air, sitting at his dining table, it made her feel a lot of things; nervous, embarrassed, humiliated…but mostly because she’d always hated swearing, but the thought of Noah saying the c-word while he was inside her made her thighs clench. “Do you want to call me dirty names again? Like you did in your chair?”